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How to Stop Gossiping

<div>How can saints hear our prayers when they’re not here on Earth? </div><div>We address your question in <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/praying-to-the-saints">our Catholic Answers tract “Praying to the Saints.”</a>
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How Saints Hear Our Prayers

The gospel is vitally important to Christians. It’s at the core of the Christian faith. But what, specifically, is the gospel?
The word’s roots mean “good news.” That’s the meaning of the Hebrew term bsorah and the Greek equivalent euangelion. But people have been giving and receiving numerous kinds of good news all through history, so what kind is meant in the Bible?
Previously, I looked at how the word gospel <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/misunderstanding-the-gospel">is used</a> in different groups—particularly Protestant ones—and some of the problems with these uses.
You may have noticed that in our previous discussion, we didn’t look at how Scripture itself uses the term. So that’s what we’ll turn to now.
Is the gospel really all about sin and salvation, about being rescued from hell and brought to heaven through the death of Jesus on the cross? Or is the gospel about something else?
The concept of the gospel leaps to prominence in the New Testament, and one of the things that’s clear about it is that it’s not coming out of nowhere. St. Paul writes that he is
<blockquote>a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures (Rom. 1:1-2).</blockquote>
If we want to understand the New Testament’s gospel, it’s important to look back into the Old Testament to see what was prophesied.
When the Old Testament speaks of good news being announced, it frequently has in mind the announcement of a military victory (2 Sam. 4:10, 18:19-31; 2 Kings 7:9; etc.). In other words, God has given his people victory in battle, and this meaning needs to be borne in mind.
The term good news becomes particularly prominent in the book of Isaiah, which—together with the Psalms—is one of the books that Jesus quotes most frequently in the four Gospels. Since Isaiah is a prophetic work, it is here that we would be most likely to find material directly prophesying the emergence of the gospel in the New Testament.
It is thus no surprise when we consult Isaiah and discover that the end of the book—which frequently deals with the coming age of the Messiah—has multiple references to good news. For example, we read this:
<blockquote>Go on up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good news;
lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good news; 
lift it up, fear not; 
say to the cities of Judah, “Behold your God!” 
Behold, the Lord God comes with might, and his arm rules for him; 
behold, his reward is with him, and his recompense before him (40:9-10).</blockquote>
Here the good news that is announced to Israel is the arrival of God as king. He comes with mighty power, and his right arm is going to rule. This hooks into the theme of military victory that we have already seen associated with the idea of good news.
Next, we read this:
<blockquote>How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, 
who publishes peace, 
who brings good news of happiness, 
who publishes salvation, 
who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.” (Isa. 52:7).</blockquote>
Here the good news being announced is that there will be a time in which Israel’s God reigns, resulting in a time of peace, happiness, and salvation—the last of these being a common Old Testament reference to salvation from one’s enemies in battle, again hooking into the theme of military victory.
Finally, we read this:
<blockquote>The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, 
because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; 
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, 
to proclaim liberty to the captives, 
and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; 
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (Isa. 61:1-2).</blockquote>
Here the good news being announced includes encouraging the brokenhearted, proclaiming liberty to those who are captive or in prison, and the reason for this is the arrival of the year of the Lord’s favor—so once again, God brings about a new and improved state of affairs for his people.
We thus see Isaiah building up a picture of a coming time when God will arrive with powerful might and a strong right arm; he will reign and bring peace, happiness, and salvation from their enemies to his people; and in this time of the Lord’s favor, he will encourage the brokenhearted and announce liberty to captives and those in prison.
That is the essential content of the good news or gospel that Isaiah focuses on.
How well does Isaiah’s understanding correspond to the way the concept is handled in the four Gospels? The earliest reference we find to Jesus preaching the gospel is in Mark 1:
<blockquote>Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel” (vv. 14-15).</blockquote>
This fits very well with the understanding of the gospel in Isaiah. Here the gospel is presented as being “of God”—that is, it is good news from or about God—and it is announced that “the time is fulfilled”—meaning that what has been previously prophesied is now arriving. The thing that is now arriving is “the kingdom of God.” And the appropriate response is to repent or turn away from one’s sins and believe in the gospel, or good news, of God’s arriving kingdom.
All this fits with the vision of the gospel presented in Isaiah of a time when God would arrive with power and begin to rule in a new golden age, in which God’s people—those who have repented of sin and allied with God—will be blessed.
We also find a connection with Isaiah’s understanding of the good news in Luke, where we read this:
<blockquote>[Jesus] came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read. And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (4:16-21).</blockquote>
Here Jesus quotes Isaiah 61—a passage we read earlier—and he announces that it was being fulfilled in his ministry. So Jesus was directly hooking into Isaiah’s understanding of the coming time of good news in which God would reign and bless his people.
This understanding of the gospel as the arrival of the kingdom of God is a common theme in the New Testament.
If you search the New Testament for references to “gospel of” or “good news of,” you’ll turn up more than thirty references where the concept is qualified to indicate where it comes from or what it is about. Of these places, seven passages speak of the gospel “of God” (Mark 1:14; Rom. 1:1, 15:16; 1 Thess. 2:2, 8-9; 1 Pet. 4:17), and six passages speak of the gospel “of the kingdom” of God (Matt. 4:23, 9:35, 24:14; Luke 4:43, 8:1, 16:16).
These references are consistent with Isaiah’s presentation of the gospel as the time when God arrives and begins to rule in a golden age, and they reveal a strong New Testament linkage between the idea of the gospel and God and his kingdom.
You may notice that something has been missing from the passages we’ve just covered. Starting with Isaiah and continuing in the New Testament passages just mentioned, there has been a focus on the gospel as being about God coming to rule and establishing his kingdom. But there has been no mention of his Son Jesus Christ, his death on the Cross, heaven or hell, or anything like that. All of those concepts have been missing.
We can’t chalk this up to the individual passages simply failing to mention them. That proposal won’t work for the passages referring to the gospel and the kingdom in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
The reason is that Jesus did not begin his ministry and immediately announce his death on the cross. He was preaching the gospel. Mark 1:14-15 and Luke 4:16-21 both portray him doing that early on. But he didn’t reveal his coming death until much later (Matt. 16:21, Mark 8:31, Luke 9:22), and even then, the disciples didn’t understand what he meant (Matt. 16:22-23, 17:23; Mark 8:32-33, 9:32; Luke 9:45, 18:34).
Also, it wasn’t just Jesus preaching the good news. Before him, John the Baptist had done the same thing (Luke 3:18).
We thus see that—early on—there was a proclamation of the gospel that did not focus on Jesus and his death on the cross. Instead, the focus was on the time arriving for God to come and inaugurate his kingdom. That’s why the gospel is so frequently referred to as the gospel of God and the gospel of the kingdom.
What role Jesus would play in these events had not yet been revealed.
This has important implications for how the New Testament understands the idea of the gospel.
It is true that Jesus died on a cross so that we could be forgiven our sins, saved from going to hell, and brought to be with God forever. However, sin and salvation are not what the gospel is about. That is a fundamental misframing of the concept as the New Testament understands it.
Instead, the New Testament initial understanding of the gospel is as the good news that the time has arrived for God to begin to reign and inaugurate his kingdom.
This is done through his Son’s death on the cross—so Jesus has the pivotal role in bringing God’s kingdom about—but it is the arrival of God’s kingdom that is the good news itself.
It’s to the relationship of the gospel and God’s Son that we’ll turn next.

What Does Scripture Say About the Gospel?

<div>When should Catholics put up their Christmas tree and decorations? Are there any rules about this?</div><div>There is no rule about when to put up <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/christmas">Christmas</a> decorations. You can put them up and take them down whenever you want. You can even leave them up all year long!
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Christmas Decorations

<div>What is the origin of evil?</div><div>God’s creatures—beginning with the devil and his demonic confrères, and then mankind, beginning with our first parents—not the creator, are responsible for the moral evil in the world. Moral evil results from the misuse of the God-given gift of free will, first with the fallen angels and then mankind, and associated general disorder results from that moral evil.
For more on this general subject, please see our responses on <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/can-free-will-thwart-gods-plan">how the free will of creatures can’t thwart God’s plan</a>, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/to-hell-with-heaven">the devil’s creation and related consequences</a>, and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/augustine-had-it-right-calvin-did-not">how St. Augustine had it right on free will and John Calvin didn’t</a>.
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How Did Evil Come to Be?

Is Salvation Possible for Non-Catholics?

Count the cost, take up your cross, and follow Christ. This is the basic invitation embedded in all the difficult language about hating family.
It is hard language, but the Church has always read this as rabbinical hyperbole. The Lord doesn’t actually want you to hate your family; he wants you to love your family. But he does want to make clear, as he does in other ways elsewhere, that love for our family is not the central purpose of life, and that the goods of family life should not be placed higher than the goods of divine life. Christ follows this example himself, according to St. Ambrose, when elsewhere he asks, “Who is my mother? Who are my brethren?” (Matt. 12:46). We know quite well that the Lord loves his Mother, but he emphasizes that this love’s stability depends not merely on a natural relationship, but on the mutual love that he and his mother share for the will of God.
Many martyrs of the early Church, as well as modern martyrs in other parts of the world, have faced this stark point of decision, where following Jesus means being rejected by family or friends. There is good reason that several commentators on this passage reference Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s concept of “cheap grace.” Though Bonhoeffer is a Protestant, he criticizes the way that the idea of “salvation by faith alone” can allow “forgiveness without repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession” (The Cost of Discipleship).
Though Catholics do not believe in “salvation by faith alone,” multiple versions of this easy grace pervade in mainstream modern Catholicism. Sometimes it hides within a more “progressive” emphasis on Catholic social teaching and matters of justice, suggesting that we don’t need to offer focus on personal repentance, faith, and relationship with Jesus as much as we need to work for economic and political change. Sometimes it hides under a more “conservative” emphasis on Catholic doctrine, suggesting that if we offer reverent worship and orthodox teaching, we don’t need to worry about doing hard things out in the world. Both of those are caricatures to a certain extent, but they’re meant to say how hard it is to really live as disciples when so many forces, both within and without the Church, push us to take the easy way, the way of cheap grace, which is really no grace at all.
How, after all, can we hear the call to “follow” Christ without equating this call with the invitation of the latest “influencer,” pop psychologist, fitness guru, or outrage farmer, to “follow” his channel? To follow someone now means a single click or tap, a sort of informal contract that allows his “content” to enter the algorithm more regularly. If we don’t like it, we can always unfollow him or instruct the algorithm to show his content less often. You can, in some cases, be “following” someone even while you have blocked everything he wants to share with you.
It seems that, in point of fact, the majority of American Catholics treat their relationship with Christ and his Church in this way. Sure, some of them will “unfollow” the Church by actively rejecting their baptism or joining some sect, but most people don’t feel any need to do anything so drastic. This widespread idea that you can continue to “follow” Jesus without actually doing anything has to be one of the devil’s favorite concepts.
So this is the landscape where Christ’s warnings about family can be translated. Following him is not just another thing you do alongside following your favorite football team, your favorite shoe brand, and your favorite podcaster. Following him has to mean you’re covered in the dust from his feet; it has to mean you’re so close that you start to love the things that he loves and hate the things that he hates, so close that his suffering starts to become part of you and your relationship with the world.
This is why St. Paul confronts his disciple Philemon about his runaway slave Onesimus. Following Jesus means that he can no longer hold this man as a slave. Yes, there is a cost to that, a cost that would have seemed unacceptable in mainstream Greco-Roman culture. But it is a necessary cost that comes from following Jesus.
There are some modern readers who get annoyed because Paul doesn’t come right out and condemn slavery in a general way, as modern Christians finally began to do in the nineteenth century. And it’s fine to be annoyed at the slow work of history, or in the way that Christians have often dragged their feet about things that seem obvious to us. Though I suspect that we often drag our feet about things that would have seemed rather obvious in a different age! Anyway, this letter was never a systematic moral treatise; it was a direct and personal directive. It would have cost nothing for Paul to speak in some abstract way about the evils of slavery. What was costly was the direct personal appeal, founded in relationship. You, he says, belong to Christ now, so your life must be different. That made much more of a difference to Onesimus than a general appeal to principles.
If we can just stick with that topic for a moment, it serves as a useful example. I don’t know any modern Christian who would think it okay to own slaves. This is good, I think, but it isn’t especially praiseworthy, because it is not as if you have to make great sacrifices to be against slaveholding in the twenty-first century. So we can pat ourselves on the back about our moral uprightness in things like this: the fact that we don’t own slaves, or the fact that we avoid murdering babies, or maybe even the fact that we avoid voting for politicians who are in favor of murdering babies. Great! And maybe sometimes these views may be unpopular, so we risk here and there some social alienation. Maybe it is even hard.
But some of us who hold to these standards may find it very hard to get to Mass every week, or to follow the Church’s discipline of fasting, or to boldly preach the gospel to our neighbors, or to truly support the needs of the Church from our substance and not just from our excess. These are the places where ordinary Catholics often fail to count the cost, the places where we have convinced ourselves that grace is easy, that we can follow Christ but ignore what he says when it seems convenient.
To be sure, the Lord has great mercy for our weakness, and we will often stumble and fall. But these falls should be while carrying our cross, attempting to follow our Lord. If we never even pick it up or move, because we don’t think we have to, or because somehow we think we are entitled to salvation, we will have chosen the way of death. Choose then the way of life, and the way of wisdom, which is the way of the cross.

Being Catholic Can’t Be Easy

Many parents of young children get tired of hearing “they grow up so fast,” or worse, “treasure every moment”—those sentimental comments from well-meaning folks piling fuel onto the fires of parental anxiety. I know I hated hearing those things in the early years of our family. Maybe I’m just not a very nice person.
But this sentimentality has a certain truthfulness that takes on a harder edge as we all get older, which is less about savoring the moment—something almost always easier to say for someone on the outside viewing it from the lens of their own nostalgia—and more about remembering innocence from the standpoint of experience. There just are some things that are hard to appreciate until they’re lost.
This basic lesson is one way of thinking of human history after the Fall. I often think that Joni Mitchell singing “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” in 1970, whatever her exact intention at the time, contained a kind of accidental prophetic summary of that era, one of many eras in which humanity seemed content to throw aside its own nature and vocation. Since Adam we have been longing to return to Eden, longing to find our way back to Paradise, to immortality, to Communion. We remember this calling in our bones, and at times it will seem that civilization is moving in the direction of remembrance and restoration, only to achieve a yet more dramatic collapse. That longing that we have, to go back to childhood, to relive the happy days of our youth, or to relieve the happy days of our children’s youth, is much more than the idle discontent of age; it is a symptom of the human condition, which is locked in the cycle of its own failures.
Just last week, at Palm Sunday, we lived out that cycle in microcosm: waving the palm branches in praise at one moment, calling for the Lord’s unjust execution the next. By tradition, those palms are burned to make ashes for a future Lent, and so the cycle continues, not just ritually and liturgically, but in history, in relationships, in the human soul. We are stuck.
This is why, as Pope Benedict points out in a homily from 2010, the ongoing medical quest for immortality is doomed. All our science is focused on the prevention of suffering and death. Would it be good if we achieved that goal? No, he insists: we would only grow more old and more miserable, closed off from youth and innovation, stuck yet more permanently in the cycle of failure. “The true cure for death must be different,” the Holy Father says. “It cannot lead simply to an indefinite prolongation of this current life.”
In rising from the dead, our Lord Jesus Christ doesn’t just show us back to the Garden as if nothing had changed. Innocence cannot simply be restored. But something new is born: a humanity somehow both restored and changed, elevated, glorified, united with the light and life of God. This isn’t putting a bandage on the gaping wound of sin and death. It is allowing the whole organism to die so that it can be reconstituted.
This is hard because it seems to deny the longing to not die, to go back to what we have lost. Easter joy can come across as hollow if we think of the Resurrection as just the possibility of continuing this life as it is. But this is something better: the ability to move forward, not back, through the corruption and death of this life’s cross to the new day of resurrection.
Once again I have to quote Pope Benedict, who, in another Easter homily (from 2009), points to the “alleluia” as one of the great signs of the Resurrection. “When a person experiences great joy, he cannot keep it to himself. He has to express it, to pass it on. But what happens when a person is touched by the light of the resurrection, and thus comes into contact with Life itself, with Truth and Love? He cannot merely speak about it. Speech is no longer adequate. He has to sing.” Often writers of the tradition speak of the alleluia as a kind of heavenly song, extending beyond the syllabic limitations of ordinary human language to the wordless jubilation of the angels and saints.
But the Holy Father then recalls the crossing of the Red Sea, that great metaphor for baptism. He notes how we sing Moses’ great song of triumph, the Cantemus Domino, while still in the darkness of the Easter Vigil:
<blockquote>While, strictly speaking, she ought to be sinking, the Church sings the song of thanksgiving of the saved. She is standing on history’s waters of death and yet she has already risen. Singing, she grasps at the Lord’s hand, which holds her above the waters. And she knows that she is thereby raised outside the force of gravity of death and evil — a force from which otherwise there would be no way of escape — raised and drawn into the new gravitational force of God, of truth and of love.
At present, the Church and all of us are still between the two gravitational fields. But once Christ is risen, the gravitational pull of love is stronger than that of hatred; the force of gravity of life is stronger than that of death. . . .
Perhaps this is actually the situation of the Church in every age. . . . It always seems as if she ought to be sinking, and yet she is always already saved.</blockquote>
Here Israel at the Red Sea is a type of the Church, but the image also recalls St. Peter attempting to walk on water, sinking with lack of faith, calling out for the Lord’s hand.
Easter is that hand. Perhaps we are no longer like innocent children who can grab their father’s hand with absolute simple confidence. We rightly lament that loss, but we cannot go back in time. How wonderful, then, that the Lord has walked with us in time and history so that he can, in that resurrected humanity, reach out to us, whatever our age, or our maturity, or our strength, to pull us from the waters of this world toward the light of his eternity!

An Easter Reflection for Cynical Parents

<div>May a priest marry you at a hotel venue for a mixed marriage?</div><div>Yes, the Bishop can grant permission for a marriage to take place in another &#8220;suitable place&#8221; (<a href="http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/__P40.HTM">can. 1118 §2</a>).
A marriage between a Catholic and a non-Catholic could be granted this permission to maintain family harmony for the ceremony. This usually arises if one of the families is anti-Catholic or if the other family is of a non-Christian faith. The non-church location for the wedding could be a hotel.
However, this is left to the prudential judgment of the local bishop, and if he does not believe the proposed location is appropriate or that the reasons presented justify the permission, then he is free to not grant permission. Priests also are not required to perform marriages outside of their parishes, and thus, even if there are valid reasons that justify a neutral and secular location for the wedding, the couple still needs to find a willing and able priest.
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Is a Hotel Wedding Permitted?

What is the unforgivable sin? Fr. Matthew Spencer provides clarity on this complex biblical concept. Learn about the Church&#8217;s interpretation of the unforgivable sin and how it relates to despair and disbelief in God&#8217;s mercy. Discover the importance of trust in God&#8217;s forgiveness and how to overcome anxiety about committing this sin.
Transcript:
I&#8217;m going to go to Memphis, Tennessee. Charles is in Memphis. Thank you for the call. Charles, go ahead with your question for Father Matthew Spencer. Yes, sir. I just had a question regarding the unforgivable sound. Okay. You know, we see in the Bible, it&#8217;s in Scripture, and then the church fathers sort of deviate on have different interpretations. The didache, if I&#8217;m pronouncing that right, has an interpretation. And I was just wondering, how can we know and rest assured that we know what the sin is nowadays?
Oh, very good question. 
I worry about if I&#8217;ve committed it or not.
I see. I see. Well, first of all, I&#8217;m glad that you call Charles because it gives us the opportunity to ponder and consider what this is. But before I do, I just want to harken back to the last hour we had John Papino in the studio with Cy. And one of the observations he made, I felt was important, you know, that the church fathers recognized that there are many different ways to interpret Scripture. And not because Scripture itself is not clear, but because God&#8217;s teachings can come to us in multiform ways and God, the richness of God&#8217;s teaching can be expressed in Scripture in a beautiful variety of ways. So, for example, sometimes we hear a passage, and that passage resonates with us in one way and speaks, illuminates some part of our heart and our life at that point that we need. 
And then later in life, we hear that passage, and it gives us a different insight. And that&#8217;s certainly, of course, the Spirit helping us to connect with Scripture in that way. And I would say, therefore, that this particular Scripture passage you&#8217;re referring to, Mark 3, 28, or Matthew 12, 31, also found in Luke, generally has an interpretation that I&#8217;m going to give to you, but is not definitively defined by the church. The church doesn&#8217;t say dogmatically that there is only one interpretation of what Jesus is referring to in the one unforgivable sin. So generally, the way that we interpret this is that it is a form of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, which also for us could be a failure, a despair of God&#8217;s mercy. 
These are two different ways of saying the same thing, that essentially, if I don&#8217;t believe that I can be forgiven, because I think that God&#8217;s mercy is limited or something like this, then of course, I&#8217;m not going to be able to be forgiven, because to be forgiven requires that I&#8217;m open to that particular forgiveness. So this is generally how we explain and understand this particular sin. And therefore, Charles, I would say, if you are going to God&#8217;s mercy, then you don&#8217;t need to worry at all that you are not repenting of this particular sin. 
Why? Because you are trusting, in fact, in God&#8217;s mercy, and you are wanting God&#8217;s forgiveness in your life. So I would say to you, Charles, don&#8217;t let that doubt that seems to sometimes trouble you about maybe there&#8217;s a sin there that you&#8217;re not aware of, and maybe that won&#8217;t be forgiven. No, that is not the way that God works. It&#8217;s not the way that forgiveness and mercy works. It&#8217;s not like a game we&#8217;re trying to play where God is hiding sins from us and not allowing us and maybe going to hold back forgiveness because we didn&#8217;t think about this. No, he wants us to be forgiven. He wants us to experience his mercy. The only time that he couldn&#8217;t give us his mercy is if we didn&#8217;t want it, and if we just despaired of that mercy and pushed it away. So as long as you&#8217;re open to God&#8217;s mercy, then you certainly wouldn&#8217;t be offending against some blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. 
Okay, Charles? 
Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. 
Thank you. 
Hey, thanks for watching. If you like this Catholic Answer, be sure to like, subscribe, and check out our live streams Monday through Friday, 3 to 5 p.m. Pacific, or find the episode after on YouTube, your favorite podcast platform, or our Catholic Answers app.

“I Worry I’ve Committed the Unforgivable Sin”

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One question that exposes every pro-choice argument 👇

This has been <a href="https://www.usccb.org/topics/marriage-and-family-life-ministries/national-marriage-week">National Marriage Week</a>, and of course today is St. Valentine’s. A double reason, then, to honor one of the primordial forces of human nature: the inner drive of man and woman to seek out and cling to one another in a permanent, exclusive embrace, for their mutual aid and the bearing and raising of children.
This force, however, once as constant as gravity and as powerful as the sun, seems to be… slipping.
Not only have marriage rates been tumbling for a generation; now young adults in the West aren’t <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/02/14/gen-z-love-instagram-tiktok-dating/78336999007/">even coupling and fornicating like they used to</a>, either. Everyone has a theory as to why:
<ul>
<li>Effortless access to pornography is sating or dulling the desire for sex that used to motivate a young man to pair with a young woman (and ideally to marry her).</li>
<li>The nonstop entertainments and virtual relationships afforded by devices are disincentivizing both men and women to socialize in person.</li>
<li>Economic factors, real or perceived, are making those virtual relationships, and casual group hangouts, easier to fit into the budget than traditional dating (and certainly marriage and children).</li>
<li>Some ambient cultural or environmental pollutant is messing with young people’s minds and bodies: the sexual confusion wrought by pervasive gay and trans activism; stunting of social skills during the Covid years; residual hormones from sixty years of artificial contraception leeching into in our water supply; vaccines or seed oils or chemtrails or whatever your public-health soapbox is.</li>
</ul>
Whatever the reason or reasons, the West is <a href="https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/newsroom/news-releases/lancet-dramatic-declines-global-fertility-rates-set-transform">staring smack at a crisis</a> unprecedented in history: a systemic loss of desire for one generation to court, mate, form families, and create another generation.
In this context, we might take a fresh look at recent discussion over the state of Catholic marriage preparation. (I spent several years as a diocesan marriage &amp; family minister, preparing thousands of couples for matrimony, and the subject is of special interest to me.) In recent years, Pope Francis and some bishops have advocated for much longer and more-stringent marriage-prep programs than most dioceses currently require.
This has <a href="https://www.ncregister.com/cna/should-the-church-require-a-year-of-marriage-prep-catholic-formators-weigh-in">divided Catholic opinion</a> along unpredictable lines: some of the usual papal critics like it and some of the usual papal defenders are opposed—and everything in between.
Me? I see arguments for both sides, but I think I come down firmly on one of them.
The pro side for making marriage preparation longer and more involved boils down to one principle: more knowledge is better. Marriage is a “great mystery,” as St. Paul said, and great mysteries require deep and careful attention. How else are we going to reduce Catholic divorce rates and promote marital happiness, if not by a thorough and even demanding pre-marriage boot camp that gets couples truly ready for what lies ahead?
The con side says, yes, marriage is a deep and ineffable mystery. But it’s a mystery we slowly come to understand through living it. The basics of marriage are easy enough to teach and make people understand; after that, it’s on-the-job training.
You might have guessed that, since I put it second, I side with the con folks—and you’d be right. And I think today’s poll data about cratering attitudes toward dating and marrying throw the con arguments into sharp relief. How the heck are we going to encourage marriage by making it seem more complicated and making it harder to do?
Men and women have been marrying naturally for many millennia. Christian men and women have been uniting themselves to each other sacramentally for nearly two. Most of them have been illiterate, minimally catechized, without specialized resources. They had no problem forming exclusive unions, bearing and raising children, and usually staying together until death.
Sure, every age has its troubles, and the Church in every age should respond to them. Today, for instance, the best marriage and family ministry includes joyful apologetics for Catholic teaching on the marital goods of fecundity and indissolubility, because these two goods have been under special attack since the Sexual Revolution.
But, the basics of marriage are the same in every age. It doesn’t take a master’s degree or hundreds of hours of special seminars for couples to know what they’re signing up for and consent to it. You used to be two; now you are one. You can’t have anyone else. It can’t be undone. Now go make babies if you can.
All the rest—“getting to know each other” and improving communication and setting goals and managing finances and changing diapers and learning to say sorry and everything else—this is the work of a lifetime. The theological and spiritual mysteries of the sacrament and its saving graces are likewise the stuff of lifelong growth and reflection. Let’s not overwhelm our already-anxious younger generations by making them think they need to work out all of it before they say, “I do.”
Or, indeed, before they say, “Will you?” Or even, “Want to grab some coffee?”
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Don’t Overcomplicate Marriage!

Does Christ Still Have a Body?

Jesus instructed his followers to &#8220;<a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/call-no-man-father">call no man father</a> on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven&#8221; (Mt. 23:9). How are we to understand the meaning of this command? Jimmy Akin explains.

Understanding “Call No Man Father”

Catholic school ≠ Catholic expert.

Is in Persona Christi limited to the priest celebrating the mass or does it extend to the magisterium?

Is there a possible connection between “calling no man father” and people in the New Testament being baptized and assigning their spirituality on those who baptized them?

At what point is a marriage considered sacramental outside the Catholic Church?

Why should I become Catholic if my western rite Orthodoxy is so similar without the baggage?

My father is not a Catholic and is battling cancer. I’ve been offering holy communion for him. Is that allowed? What does the Church say about cremation?

Should we respond with ‘because God said so’ when approaching social issues in apologetic debates?

Ask Me Anything

In Acts 2, St. Peter gets up at Pentecost and declares that (a) Jesus&#8217; Tomb is empty because He is risen, and (b) that the Apostles are all witnesses of the risen Christ.
Do we have any good reason to believe that this really happened? How do we know that St. Peter was telling the truth? How do we know that Acts 2 is historically accurate? (Did St. Luke just invent this Pentecost sermon?)

Did Peter Lie About the Resurrection?

<div>What is "New Ways Ministry"?</div><div>New Ways Ministry claims that it &#8220;educates and advocates for justice and equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Catholics, and reconciliation within the larger church and civil communities.&#8221;
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has stated that the group is not an approved Catholic group and cannot claim to speak on behalf of Catholics.
In 1999, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith determined that the group&#8217;s two founders were &#8220;permanently prohibited from any pastoral work involving homosexual persons and are ineligible, for an undetermined period, for any office in their respective religious institutes.&#8221;
<a href="http://www.usccb.org/news/2010/10-028.cfm">USCCB President Clarifies Status of New Ways Ministry</a>
<a href="http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19990531_gramick-nugent-notification_en.html">Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Notification Regarding Sr. Jeannine Gramick and Fr. Robert Nugent</a>
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What Is ‘New Ways Ministry’?

Question Covered:
<ul>
<li>06:49 &#8211; Can you explain the concept of a new Heaven and a new Earth? </li>
<li> 15:19 &#8211; How can I help my Christian Grandmother’s salvation without hurting her feelings? </li>
<li> 21:19 &#8211; Can you explain what Paul meant by handing a sinner&#8217;s flesh to Satan so his soul can be saved in 1 Cor 5:5? </li>
<li>30:50 &#8211; Can you explain why temporal sinfulness can merit eternal punishment?  </li>
<li>43:47 &#8211; How does Purgatory work and how can we get out? </li>
<li>47:19 &#8211; My priest wrote that the worst pain you can have is in purgatory, where in the bible might this be? </li>
<li>51:17 &#8211; Does Mark 14:7 excuse us from giving to the poor?  </li>
</ul>

The Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell

What is the necessity of purification after death but before heaven?

What is the textual criticism of John 8 and the woman caught in adultery?

Why is the pope pushing heresy by allowing people to receive communion after a divorce?

How does one know if they believe in their heart?

How does Jesus fulfill the prophecy of reuniting all the tribes of Israel?

What are the requirements for being an apologist?

My friend asked us to take their children if anything ever happened to them but told us to not baptize them. Would I have to honor that or are we morally obligated to baptize them?

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DAY 7
CHALLENGE
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“Why would a good God allow physical evils like suffering and death?”
DEFENSE
We don’t have full answers to the problem of evil in this life, but we can see that at least some physical evils are helpful.
God can tolerate some physical evils because good comes from them. According to John Paul II: “Certain forms of physical ‘evil’ . . . belong to the very structure of created beings, which by their nature are con- tingent and passing, and therefore corruptible. Besides, we know that material beings are in a close relation of interdependence as expressed by the old saying: ‘the death of one is the life of another.’ So then, in a certain sense death serves life” (General Audience, June 4, 1986).
We see this in the natural world, such as when a lion kills a zebra so that it can eat. The death of the zebra serves the life of the lion. In the same way, the living things we humans eat (whether plants or animals) sustain our lives.
The Catechism says:
With infinite wisdom and goodness God freely willed to create a world “in a state of journeying” towards its ultimate perfection. In God’s plan this process of becoming involves the appearance of certain beings and the disappearance of others, the existence of the more perfect alongside the less perfect, both constructive and de- structive forces of nature. With physical good there exists also phys- ical evil as long as creation has not reached perfection (CCC 310).
Pain can also play a valuable role in our lives. Some people suffer from congenital insensitivity to pain, and its results can be dramatic, even fatal. Physical pain serves as a warning system, and people with- out a proper pain response can be severely injured or killed. Even emotional pain can be useful. The emotion of fear alerts us to danger and motivates us to take steps to avoid it.
TIP
Although some suffering plays a valuable role in the present life, this doesn’t exhaust the problem of evil. Unlike the above examples, some suffering serves no obvious purpose (see the question for Day 38). The above answer, however, provides a partial explanation of why God tolerates some suffering and how he brings good out of it.
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Suffering with a Purpose

The MOST Catholic doctrine | @shamelesspopery

<div>How do you explain to a Protestant that you can pray to Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary?</div><div>In a nutshell, we’re asking Mary to intercede for us to Jesus, similar to how Protestants ask their Christian friends on Earth to join them in praying for a particular matter—except Mary and the other saints in heaven are definitely in a better position to intercede for us with Jesus, precisely because they’re in heaven. In addition, when we speak of uniting our prayers with Mary’s Immaculate Heart, we’re asking for the Blessed Mother’s intercession in another way.
For more on intercessory prayer, including scriptural citations to share with your Protestant friends, see our tracts on <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/praying-to-the-saints">“Praying to the Saints”</a> and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-intercession-of-the-saints">“The Intercession of the Saints.”</a>
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How Do I Explain Praying to Jesus through Mary?

If there are conjoined twins who are saints and they have the power of bilocation, would they be able to bilocate separately or should they bilocate together?

Will conjoined twins still be joined in their resurrected bodies?

In marriage, is the “good of the spouses” supplied by nature, or grace?

What is the Church’s stance on the history of St Veronica?

Can God “forgive” you your sins or could it be more accurate to say He is the immutable embodiment of forgiveness itself- thus really only we can change by atoning and reorienting ourselves to Him?

My son, Joshua wants to ask you if you think the Superman movies could have a Christian allegory to them?

How/why did the Jews become monotheists?

Where did the prayer come from that w e say at Mass after the Our Father… “For Thine is the Kingdom,,,”

Why do you suppose the account of Peter walking on the water only in Matthew?

My daughter has a turtle. One day, she was laying on the floor with the turtle. The turtle looks at her, then at a piece of fence about a foot or two tall, and back at her a few times. The turtle then runs to the fence, pushes it over to create a ramp ...

What’s your take on original monotheism?

Will we continue learning in heaven? Or will we just instantaneously *know* everything we can know?

Did Jesus drink wine, or was it just grape juice?

If Jesus submitted his DNA to 23&Me would it prove that Joseph was his Father?

If a pagan god were to meet Jesus and convert to Christianity, would they go to heaven if they died?

As far as I understand it, current physics tells us that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light since, if it did, you would (among other problems) get paradoxes. However, it seems like an angel could convey information faster than lig...

Your recent episodes on demons and the different beliefs on how people get possessed made me think. Could the dark forces be targeting powerful latent “psychic” individuals? It would fit with your demons being opportunists, and with Amorth&...

In the case of Ash Wednesday when fasting and abstinence is required, would receiving communion break one’s fast or count as a smaller meal? In other words, can one receive communion in addition to eating one full meal and two smaller meals? Than...

Let’s say we made contact with an alternate timeline whose divergence point is after the year 100. They have a recognizable continuing Petrine ministry. Does their pope (probably called something else) have immediate and universal jurisdiction in our t...

Do stage magicians have actual preternatural gifts?

Weird Questions

What would the Church do if it were discovered that it had allowed a marriage between two males unwittingly? That is to say, what if one of those men “identified” as a woman, and the job of appearing as a woman had been done so well that no one, from marriage prep all the way to the ceremony, suspected anything?
On one level, the answer is simple. That attempted marriage would be null and void, because a valid marriage, either on the natural or the sacramental level, can be validly ratified and consummated only between one male and one female. Simple enough.
However, the question opens up more things for us to consider. For example, according to the language the Church uses, rooted in the metaphysical reality of mankind as created by God, there are only two sexes: male and female. Gender is a synonym for sex (see CCC 2331-2336). There is no such thing as a “biological male” who becomes a “female by gender.” That is fiction, pure and simple.
The Catholic Church teaches the soul to be the form of the body. That means that it is the soul—immediately created by God—that determines, along with the body, the sex of the individual. The soul is both the unifying and the life-giving principle that makes the body a human body. Thus, the sex or gender of a human being is not determined in the mind. It is determined by God at conception, and it later manifests in the body.
A person can “identify” himself in any way he wants to. He can “identify” himself as a tomato plant. But a male human being is truly a “he”—not a “she,” not an “it”—and this reality can be scientifically verified, apart from any delusions a man may have about who or what he thinks he is. Scientists can take a blood sample from him, and they can tell beyond a shadow of a doubt that this particular human being is a “he.”
In Scripture, the reality of the two sexes (or genders) of human beings, which can be known through the natural light of reason and science, is also revealed as such in the Old Testament in texts like Genesis 1:27—“male and female he created them”—and by Jesus in Matthew 19:4-6, which refers back to Genesis 1:27 along with Genesis 2:24.
<blockquote>He answered, “Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one’? So they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.”</blockquote>
One of the really beautiful things about answering the question of the sneaky transgender wedding is that here we find ourselves in a scenario (and there are many other examples) where faith and science work wonderfully and in unison to get at the reality of the situation. We know through revelation that God creates male and female exclusively. And science confirms this fundamental truth, from the chromosomal level upward. So, whether we speak of this from a religious perspective or purely from a scientific or a philosophical perspective, a man or woman cannot “assign,” or “identify” as, whatever gender he or she may wish to be. Each human being’s gender has already been “assigned” to each man, each woman, at the moment of conception.
But are there exceptions? The Church does accept the fact that there are real people who suffer from mental disorders, such as gender dysphoria, where they struggle to accept their God-given nature. But these are not “exceptions.” We believe that these folks need to be helped on the psychological and psychiatric level so they can come to terms with who they are. Unfortunately, our culture today actually encourages these people in their disorder. In fact, our culture and much of the political establishment encourage these people all the way up to them mutilating themselves to “change” their sex, as if they could. But giving male hormones to a woman does not make her a male. And putting fake breasts on a man and cutting off his genitals does not make him a “her.” It only results in a growing number of mutilated males and females in our culture.
Tragically, we now even have children being mutilated. This is child abuse.
The Church also acknowledges cases like PAIS (partial androgen insensitivity syndrome), where genetic defects occur that can lead to confusion concerning the sex of certain individuals. PAIS is a genetic disorder with various manifestations, some of which can make a male look feminine. But men afflicted with PAIS are not women. They have no uterus and no ovaries. They are men. (And yes, my friends, we Catholics do know what a woman is: simply, the adult female of the human species, whose body is ordered toward the procreation and nurturing of children. Those suffering from PAIS do not fit the bill.)
Thanks be to God that science has afforded us ways of treating these men so that some, at least, can come to function normally. But that depends upon the severity of the situation. Often, these men are sterile. And unfortunately, it represents a cross they must carry for the rest of their lives.
At any rate, here is how the Church determines these matters. Because of the fact that in 99.9999 percent of cases, the sex of each person attempting marriage is obvious to all involved, there has been no need for scientific inquiry beyond the general preparation for marriage done by priests all around the world. In fact, I have yet to hear of a single case in the entire world of a homosexual “couple” slipping by the process and getting “married” in a Catholic Church because the “transgender” half of the couple looked so authentic.
However, I would say this. The way things are going, with the growing number of mutilations going on in our culture, where it is becoming more difficult to distinguish between men and women—and given the level of immorality in our culture, generally speaking—perhaps we might get to the place where the Church starts requiring blood tests. In the old days, these tests looked for (and still look for, in the case of Montana) venereal diseases, rubella, and such. But could the Church one day require a test one day to be sure of the sexes of the couple presenting themselves for marriage? Perhaps.
Thanks be to God that we have not reached a level of cultural depravity to require a need for this kind of medical scrutiny in the Church. At least not yet.

A Secret Same-Sex Marriage?

Trent Horn&#8217;s new book explores the many ways Christ is falsely presented. He discusses these &#8220;counterfeit Christs” and why the real Christ is so much better.

Counterfeit Christs (Part 1)

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DAY 70
CHALLENGE
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“Abortion is a religious issue, and those who disapprove of abortion must not impose their religious beliefs on others.”
DEFENSE
Abortion is not a “religious issue.” It is a human-rights issue.
Even if abortion were a religious issue, there is no reason why religious people should set aside their moral values on this topic or any other. Religious values have played an indispensable role in issues from caring for the poor and the sick to ending slavery and tyranny. To suggest that religious people should not bring their values to bear on public issues also misunderstands the nature of democracy, which exists precisely to allow people to express their views on how society should be run.
But the truth is that abortion is not a religious issue. When people say it is, they imply that it is a matter of faith rather than reason. This is false. A powerful case against abortion can be made without bringing religion into the discussion. Unborn children simply are innocent hu- man beings, and their innate right to life must be respected like that of any other innocent human being (see Days 88, 185, 191, 202).
It is a scientific fact that the unborn are living human organisms. This is not a religious claim. It does not depend on the teaching of any church or spiritual leader. It is a matter of basic biology, and only deliberate self-deception could allow one to avoid this fact.
Once you recognize that, the question is what you will do in re- sponse: Will you acknowledge the right to life possessed by all in- nocent human beings? Or will you begin the rationalizations people engage in when they wish to deprive an entire class of human beings of their right to life—whether that class be unborn children, the men- tally retarded, Jews, or anyone else.
In other words, the question is whether you will side with those who justify and commit genocide or with those who seek to protect innocent human beings.
From a moral perspective, the correct choice is obvious, but too many today use the claim that abortion is a “religious issue” simply to shut down rational discussion of the subject and evade the clear impli- cations of the facts.
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Abortion as a “Religious Issue”

Joe Heschmeyer helps a caller who asks how to defend against those who claim that the church went through a Great Apostasy after the apostles died.
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Transcript (Auto-Generated):
My question is about the great apostasy.
As a Catholic, how do I defend the stance that the church did not fall into apostasy once the apostles died?
word apostasy means falling away.
And the Bible talks about apostasy, talk about people who fall away from Christianity, fall away from the church. But there are Protestants and Mormons who believe in a great apostasy, where the problem isn&#8217;t that people are falling away from the church, the ideas of the church has itself become apostate. Now I wanted to just point out that these are, even though the same word is used, they&#8217;re actually kind of opposite concepts. Because if I fall into apostasy, the problem is I&#8217;m not Catholic enough.
If the church is apostate, the problem is that I&#8217;m too Catholic.
And so even though apostasy is used in both cases,
the great apostasy isn&#8217;t people falling away from the church, it&#8217;s the church being false.
And so that&#8217;s kind of the thing I would point out. Just to kind of clarify what we&#8217;re talking about. So how do we know great apostasy isn&#8217;t true? Well, besides the fact that there&#8217;s zero biblical evidence for the church falling away, like as a church, rather than people falling away from the church. You also have all of the biblical data about the church. So I&#8217;m gonna give you just a few pieces, because there&#8217;s a lot here.
In Matthew 16, Jesus says, &#8220;I will build my church.&#8221; And I started to say, if he hadn&#8217;t have said that, if Jesus was just this great teacher, Messiah, prophet, son of God, and he didn&#8217;t build the church though,
his followers wouldn&#8217;t just say, &#8220;Well, we&#8217;re gonna go back to our old ways of life.&#8221; They would still try to follow him. They would just have to build their own denominations.
And so I like to point this out, like when Protestants approach Christianity, they&#8217;re doing it as if Jesus had said, &#8220;I will not build my church, you have to do it.&#8221; But he says the opposite. He says, &#8220;I will build my church.&#8221; So the church isn&#8217;t something we have to build. The church is something we have to find and join.
That you also have these other passages, Daniel two, for instance, Nebuchadnezzar&#8217;s dream. There&#8217;s the four tiers, gold, silver, bronze, and then iron and clay mixed together. And they represent the four kingdoms that conquer Israel. It&#8217;s Babylon, then it&#8217;s the Persian, Medo-Persian empire, then the Greek empire, then the Roman empire. And we&#8217;re told during the days of the fourth empire, so during the days of the Roman empire, a stone not formed by human hands will come and crush this, like the feet of clay, and will build a mountain that will never be destroyed. Now that to all appearances looks like someone is coming from heaven to build a kingdom on earth and that kingdom won&#8217;t be destroyed. That&#8217;s not consistent with the idea someone came from heaven, built a kingdom, and the kingdom was destroyed.
Third, you have just the description of the church. It&#8217;s the bride of Christ and it&#8217;s the body of Christ. And the entire picture all the way up to and including the book of Revelation with the wedding feast of the lamb is about this everlasting relationship between Christ and the church. And Jesus speaks of it in this way. Luke 22, he talks about the apostles sitting on 12 thrones judging the 12 tribes of Israel. And so the apostolic nature of the church, his body and bride lasts forever. And Ephesians 1, St. Paul talks about the church as the fullness of him who fills all in all. That the church is the continuation of Christ on earth. So to say that the church went into a great apostasy is to say that Christ left us as orphans when he promised he wouldn&#8217;t do that.
So all of that is the theological approach. And I would heavily lean in that. The other thing I would do though, number two is looking at the historical approach. And I&#8217;ve actually written an entire book about this. If you&#8217;d like a copy of my book, the early church was the Catholic church. Because if you&#8217;re gonna say the church originally believed X, this thing that I believe is a Protestant, as a Mormon, as whatever. And then over time, this false teaching, Y crept in. We should be able to find that in history. We shouldn&#8217;t just have to take your word for it. You should be able to show, here are all of these early Christians who interpreted the Bible the way that I do. But almost invariably, when someone makes these claims about the church going into apostasy, when you ask for the historical evidence, they point to a Bible verse and say, well, I read it this way. It&#8217;s like, well, I don&#8217;t care how you read it. Show me the centuries of people who read it the way that you do. And then that there was a switch. Because we should see a number of things. If you walked into a Protestant denomination and said, now we&#8217;re gonna start believing in the Pope, now we&#8217;re gonna start believing in the real presence, now we&#8217;re gonna start praying to Mary, there would be an outrage. Because that would be a major change. And so if all of these things that people protest about
were major changes to the structure of Christianity, to the theology of Christianity, we should see major outcry. So show me the outcry. Because we can find outcry on much smaller issues along the way, and just not this one. That is a very strange absence of evidence. But more than that, we can actually find people from remarkably early on,
taking for granted that everybody believes these very Catholic things. So that&#8217;s what I would say, that you&#8217;ve got the theological approach. It doesn&#8217;t make sense if you understand what the church is and who built it to suggest that it was destroyed by the gates of hell.
Second, you&#8217;ve got the historical approach. We can talk about the earliest Christians, people like Saint Polycarpus Smyrna, the Enignations of Antioch, Saint Irenaeus of Lyon, and Saint Justin Martyr, all before the year 200, who look and sound astonishingly Catholic.

Did the Church Have a Great Apostasy?

We know that our sins must be forgiven if we hope to get to heaven. But what about original sin? How can original sin have to be forgiven if all of humanity after Adam and Eve didn’t commit the actual sin?
The Catholic Church teaches that it is impossible for one person to be guilty of the personal sin of another. That is metaphysically absurd, as well as contrary to Scripture (see Ezek. 18:19-20, CCC 2056).
The Church teaches that Adam and Eve—and only they—committed the personal sin that we call original sin. All the rest of mankind inherits the sin of Adam, and as such is guilty of a real and proper sin, even though it is in its own category (CCC 402-406). This is a mystery, but what the Church makes clear is this that we inherit from Adam is “a state, not an act” (404). And as such, this fallen state represents a “sin” by analogy—a <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Canons_and_Decrees_of_the_Council_of_Trent/Session_V/Original_Sin">real sin</a>, but not a personal sin.
Some people wrongly believe that we Catholics mean that original sin is not “real” when we say it is not “personal.” But “personal” sin is a category of sins that differs from “original sin,” as it relates to the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. Personal sin means an actual sin committed by the individual person. Original sin, with regard to all of humanity after Adam, represents the effects of the personal sin of Adam, inherited by all of humanity via propagation. It represents, then, not a personal sin. Rather, it is a fallen state of being.
The easiest way to understand it is as the Church teaches in paragraph 404 of the Catechism:
<blockquote>How did the sin of Adam become the sin of all his descendants? The whole human race is in Adam &#8220;as one body of one man.&#8221; By this &#8220;unity of the human race&#8221; all men are implicated in Adam&#8217;s sin, as all are implicated in Christ&#8217;s justice.
Still, the transmission of original sin is a mystery that we cannot fully understand. But we do know by revelation that Adam had received original holiness and justice not for himself alone, but for all human nature. By yielding to the tempter, Adam and Eve committed a personal sin, but this sin affected the human nature that they would then transmit in a fallen state. It is a sin which will be transmitted by propagation to all mankind—that is, by the transmission of a human nature deprived of original holiness and justice.
And that is why original sin is called &#8220;sin&#8221; only in an analogical sense: it is a sin &#8220;contracted&#8221; and not &#8220;committed&#8221;—a state and not an act.</blockquote>
Now that we have made the crucial distinction between the original sin committed by Adam and Eve and the original sin inherited by the rest of humanity, we have to make another distinction between the reality that is “original sin,” often called “the stain of original sin,” that dwells in all men from conception (Ps. 51:5), and the concupiscence that remains even after the sin or stain of original sin is remitted through faith and baptism (see CCC 508, 403, etc.). The first is a true and proper sin, even though, again, it is in its own category—“a state and not an act,” as we saw in the Catechism above.
Romans 5:12 is perhaps the clearest text of Scripture that teaches the heart of the doctrine: “Sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned.”
Again, it is a sin (real), but only by analogy. All of mankind is “implicated” in Adam’s sin, as the Catechism says above, but in a mysterious way we do not fully understand. As St. Paul says in Romans 5:18-19,
<blockquote>As one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all men. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous.</blockquote>
Concupiscence represents a proclivity toward sin inherited by the Fall, but it is not itself sin at all, properly speaking, even though Paul calls it “sin” in Romans 7. He calls it “sin that dwells in me,” because it represents the fomes peccati, or “tendency to sin,” that dwells in all of us due to the fall of Adam. In this instance, it is not even “sin” by analogy, as original sin is. It is as the Council of Trent, Session Five, On Original Sin, says:
<blockquote>This concupiscence, which the apostle sometimes calls sin, the holy Synod declares that the Catholic Church has never understood it to be called sin, as being truly and properly sin in those born again, but because it is of sin, and inclines to sin.</blockquote>
In summary, notice that “original sin” is a true and proper sin, but it is very different when considering Adam versus the rest of humanity. For Adam alone (and Eve), original sin was a personal sin. For all the rest, original sin was and is also a true and proper sin, but not a personal sin. It was and is a sin by analogy, and as such, it is owned by each and every one of us as a true “sin,” but it is such as a state of being, not an act. And because it is a true and proper sin owned by each and every one of us, it must be cleansed through baptism.
Concupiscence, on the other hand, is not a sin at all. It does not have to be “forgiven.” It will be healed at the time of death. In other words, there will be no concupiscence in heaven. And this healing will be full and complete at the resurrection of the body at the end of time. Paul calls this “the redemption of the body” (Rom. 8:23).
But concupiscence does not need to be “forgiven” as if it were a personal fault, or even a sin at all, because it is not.
Redeemed? Perfected? Yes.
“Forgiven”? That’s impossible. There is nothing to forgive.

Is It a Sin to Want to Sin?

<blockquote>In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night (Gen. 1:1-5).</blockquote>
Last week we saw, in the waters of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/god-is-in-the-water">baptism</a>, the way the Incarnate Son stepped into the base materials of creation in his quest to remake us. In the beginning was water—for creation itself, for us, and for the new life of Christ’s Church. What follows the water is light.
From the face of the waters the word of the Lord says, “Let there be light.” And from the waters of the Jordan emerges, countless ages later, the one who will say, “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12).
We don’t see that particular claim in our Gospel for the day, though in this season after the Epiphany that theme remains in constantly in mind, following our proper preface, which speaks of how the “mystery of the Word made flesh” has “caused a new light to shine in our hearts.” That is, in older forms of the Roman Rite, the preface of Christmas, where at Epiphany we hear further of how the revelation of Christ in the substance of our nature has “restored us by the light of his own immortality” (nova nos immortalitatis suæ luce reparavit). The newer ordinary form of the preface shifts the light language to emphasize that Christ is the “light of the nations.” (The mixing and matching of these different prefaces in different missals over time is a subject for another day!) And this time after the Epiphany, when the Lord’s identity and purpose was first revealed to the Gentiles, is filled with stories of light, if we’re willing to see it, culminating in another few weeks at Candlemas, when Simeon prophetically names Christ the “light to lighten the Gentiles” and “the glory of thy people, Israel.”
In today’s Gospel, one of the themes that John begins to unravel is exactly the importance of seeing. “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” It’s not that often that we say “behold” in modern English—it does seem a little dramatic for everyday conversation—but I think that is exactly what John the Baptist has in mind. Making dramatic statements is very much the goal of John the Baptist.
Why is he so insistent that we “behold” Jesus? To answer this, we might pose the question on another level, which is, why does St. John the Evangelist, our Gospel writer, want us to “behold” Jesus? None of the other Gospels puts this word in the Baptist’s mouth. It is, in fact, a very Johannine thing to say. The Greek word is ide, and, though it is not an uncommon word in the New Testament, John seems to have a special fondness for it. He uses it nineteen times—more than the entire rest of the New Testament combined. “Behold the lamb of God.”
The “sight” theme continues later in John with the instruction, which is repeated a few times (showing upon this Sunday next year), to “come and see.” This instruction comes first from the mouth of Jesus and later from one of the disciples. The meaning is the same: it’s seeing Jesus that communicates something, not just knowing information about him.
What do we see when we look? John’s proclamation is an invitation to see something more than a rabbi with a following on the rise, more even than just “the Son of God.” Behold, John says, the Lamb of God. Behold the one who takes away the sins of the world.
What John invites us to see is not, surprisingly, the light of the world—not the Son of God in all his glory. John invites us to behold Jesus in his darkest and most disturbing aspect, to see him as the sacrificial victim whose blood will wash away sin.
It’s interesting that this description of Jesus comes very near the beginning of John’s Gospel, only a few short verses after John’s wonderful opening passage on the incarnation of the Word, what we know well as the Last Gospel, on the way that the light has shined in the darkness, showing us the glory of the only-begotten Son of the Father.
Already, before John has even shown us the Passion, he asks us to think about it. This Jesus, being the light, also reveals darkness. Bright light, in the natural world, makes the shadows deeper, and so it is in the Gospel story, and in the liturgical year, where the bright light of the Epiphany already starts to show us things we’d rather not think about.
So it is also in the creation story. The creation of light means that the absence of light now has a name: night. And the night, because it has no positive definition apart from the day, is always waiting for the day, always leaning toward it.
Sin and evil are, in the classic definition, nothing. That is, evil is always a corruption or an absence of the good. Even if this absence or corruption has a palpable presence and reality, its being is entirely derivative, entirely dependent on the good from which it is distinguished.
And so what we are meant to see in the Lamb of God, in this man Jesus, is the one who takes nothingness and converts it to substance, who takes corruption and turns it to health, who takes absence and transforms it to presence. “The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” This means that for a little while, the darkness thickens, but come the dawn, darkness will remain only a memory made more beautiful by its shining with the true light.
In other words, it gets darker before it gets lighter.
That is a sobering thought. I say it to suggest not anxiety or panic, but hope. Jesus is the Lamb of God, and our hope is that his light will overcome the darkness of a world ruled by sin. This hope has a firm basis in his resurrection from the dead and his ascension to glory, not to mention the countless witnesses of his resurrection that history has known in the saints. The light of the world went out, it seemed, on the cross. But the darkness did not understand it; the darkness could not overcome it, and so, behold, light springs again from darkness, because the darkness could not overcome it.
Whatever our darkness today, in this long night of history before the final dawn, whatever our wounded dreams, corrupted bodies, and fractured souls, whatever darkness we have inflicted on others—the light of the world can overcome it, because the light of the world is the Lamb of God whose death is not defeat, but triumph; not an end, but a beginning for all.
Let us then behold that light of the world, that Lamb of God, in his body the Church, in his body the Blessed Sacrament, in the hope of his future kingdom. Let us behold him and open our eyes to his presence, so that we can say to others, like those first disciples, “Come and see.” And so we will pass the night until the dawn.

It’s No Good If You Don’t See Him

In this clip, Cy Kellett welcomes Joe Heschmeyer to discuss why some people hesitate to convert to Catholicism. Joe continues with details on the importance of understanding Catholic doctrine in light of historical debates and the skills of prominent debaters like James White.
Transcript:
Caller: I have been listening to maybe all of the debates that James White has done with different Catholic scholars. And I tried to listen. Honestly, the dogmas that the Catholic Church believes were not present at all in the early church, beginning with Peter as Pope. So James White convinced you that Catholic doctrine is wrong? Well, I mean, I was convinced, but then I tried to listen and see. Oh, I see. I see. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I saw you gave the Catholics a fair hearing. Okay.
Joe Heschmeyer: Yeah, I think that&#8217;s. That&#8217;s very praiseworthy. I like that you are trying to listen with an open mind and an open heart, and I like that you&#8217;re calling into this show. I think there&#8217;s a lot that&#8217;s very good about the openness that you have there. I think I&#8217;d say a few things. Number one, James White is an excellent debater, and he often, I think, is a better debater than the people that he is up against, because even if they&#8217;re very smart, there&#8217;s a difference between being very smart and very well informed and being a great debater. And White really knows the art of debate in a way that I see him on things where I know he&#8217;s wrong and still think that he makes a great case just because he&#8217;s very skilled. I say that as a former debater, myself, as a former lawyer, that you can make a bad position look right with a lot of skills. I don&#8217;t think he does that with bad faith. I don&#8217;t mean to ascribe any kind of malice to him. I just mean to say I see what you mean, but I don&#8217;t think that actually translates him into him being actually the one who is correct. Second, in terms of the origins of the papacy, since that&#8217;s the one issue you mentioned, and the argument there is that, yeah, Peter has this special role in the early church. Now, does that look exactly like it looks for Pope Francis? Of course not. You know, leadership doesn&#8217;t look the exact same in every situation in every context. But the actual thing Catholics believe, as opposed to kind of the caricature, is found in Scripture. So just to give maybe one example, but at Luke 22, the disciples are debating which of them is the greatest. And we often kind of look at this and laugh because we&#8217;re like, oh, they&#8217;re always debating about this. But Jesus doesn&#8217;t ever criticize this. He wants them to. To want greatness. I think rather than discouraging this, Jesus explains what Christian greatness looks like. He says that the kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them. Those in Authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you. Let the greatest among you become as youngest and the leader as one who serves. And then he gives himself as a standard for what that looks like. And he says, I am among you as one who serves. And then he affirms the actual leadership that these 12 have. He says, you are those who&#8217;ve continued with me in my trials. As my Father appointed a kingdom for me, so do I appoint for you. You may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones judging the 12 tribes of Israel. In other words, the Christian model is one of what we would call servant leadership. And the authority of the Church, this enduring role of the apostles, is one that lasts not just in, you know, a few years or the first century or the first generation, but it&#8217;s a thing that lasts for all time, that the 12 will continue to have this role even into the coming kingdom as they&#8217;ll judge the 12 tribes of Israel. So within that, having just identified the model for leadership, is, I&#8217;m among you as one who serves this idea of servant leadership. He then identifies one out of the 12, Simon Peter. And he says to him, simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you all, that he might sift you all like wheat, but I have prayed for you. Now he switches from the plural you to. To the singular you that he wants, all 12 of you. But I prayed for you now our individual, that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren. This is a remarkable kind of passage because he&#8217;s just said there&#8217;s this demonic assault on all 12 of the apostles. And rather than just saying, I am the second person in the Trinity, I&#8217;m God, man. I&#8217;m going to just stop this from happening, rather than saying, I&#8217;m going to pray for all 12 of you. Rather than any of the ways that Jesus could have approached this problem, he chooses to solve it through the person of Simon Peter and tells him, strengthen your brethren. In other words, after. Immediately after having just said to lead is to serve. He then tells one of them that he&#8217;s in charge of serving the others, just as they&#8217;re in charge of serving the Church, that he&#8217;s made Peter the servant of the servants of God. That&#8217;s the understanding of the papacy, not that the Pope should boss everybody around like a gentile overlord. Jesus is very clear. That&#8217;s not it. That rather, he is to be a servant of the people of God and then a servant of those serving the people of God. That&#8217;s the understanding and included within that, from the earliest days of the Church, we see people turning to the Bishop of Rome to figure out what he believes and viewing communion with him and communion with his beliefs as being a really central part of the Catholic thing. And we see that in a couple of ways. Now, I mentioned the Scripture once. Let me give you just two quick historical ones. First, you have the letter called First Clement in 96 AD, roughly thereabouts, while the Apostle John is still alive. The Corinthians have had an issue with an internal dispute in the Church. And rather than writing to the living apostle, they write to the Bishop of Rome, who writes back and settles the issue. That gives us a clear impression that the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, has this really important, really central kind of role. But additionally, I would say when you get to the arguments that Irenaeus makes against heresies, in 180 AD, in book three, I mentioned earlier that he talked about apostolic succession. The reason that he says that he traces the lineage of bishops from Peter on down in Rome, as opposed to everywhere else, is because he says it&#8217;s a matter of necessity that every church should agree with this Church on account of its preeminent authority, that he&#8217;s recognizing this special place the successor of Peter has in the Bishop of Rome. And this is in the second century. This is extremely early on. So I would say you can find that all throughout the writings of the early Church Fathers. You find it in people like St. Optatus of Milevis, you find it all over the place. Augustine as well. So I would say that the idea of this is some later thing. It&#8217;s very hard to sustain historically.
Joe Heschmeyer: Hasan, I&#8217;m going to leave it there, but I would like to offer you Joe&#8217;s book, Pope Peter, because you said you have an open mind, you&#8217;d like to consider these things. If you&#8217;d like to consider it, we&#8217;ll send you a free copy of Pope Peter. Just hang on the line.

I’m Not Catholic Because of the Pope…

<div>Is Mary a saint, and can I use her for my baptism saint name?</div><div>You may certainly use “Mary” as your baptismal name, as she is the Mother of God and Queen of Heaven and Earth and thus of all angels and saints (see CCC 966). If you don’t want to formally/legally change your name by taking an explicitly Christian name at baptism, you could instead take “Mary” as your Confirmation name and thereby make the Blessed Mother your special patron.
</div>

May I Use “Mary” as My Baptismal Name?

Is prayer similar to telepathy? Do the saints in heaven communicate telepathically?

Human beings have no memory of their time as infants or their time while in the womb. Is it possible that during these times, God has the ability to communicate with human beings, and they can understand and respond? Or if certain things about our live...

If you could go back in time to any time period. What event would you try to change the outcome of and how would you do it? (Assuming that changing the past is possible).

Do Daleks have souls?

If we assume ghosts are real, why would they even exist? Why would God allow a soul to stay on Earth? Doesn’t that go against everything Christ taught about what happens when humans die? How can one reconcile the Christian afterlife with ghosts?

Do you go clockwise or counterclockwise when praying the rosary?

&#8220;Can saints communicate telepathically?&#8221; This episode explores the intriguing connection between prayer and telepathy, while also delving into whether God communicates with us before birth and the existence of ghosts in relation to Christian teachings. Join us as we tackle these thought-provoking questions and more, including the nature of souls and the practice of praying the rosary.
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Can Saints Communicate Telepathically, Ghosts, and Prayer?

Tim Staples explains the Church&#8217;s position on immigration, national security, and how nations should strive as much as possible to help refugees without also sacrificing the best interests of their citizens.
Transcript:
Host: We go now to Karen in Cincinnati, Ohio listening on Sacred Heart Radio. Karen, you are on with Tim Staples.
Karen: Hi! Thank you, and I don&#8217;t want this to sound harsh, I don&#8217;t mean it to be, but my question is this: I hear a lot of different things on Catholic radio, from the Pope down to priests and everything like that, about how we need to be compassionate to all immigrants, and my question is, I understand that, but I don&#8217;t have compassion for illegal immigrants to come into the United States, and get on the welfare system, take jobs from Americans, rape, bring drugs over; and I&#8217;m not saying every illegal immigrant is doing this, but people have broken the law. And so I hear the Pope talking about how we need to be all this and that, you know what, he lives a very wealthy life over there in the Vatican. They have billions of dollars, and they have a wall around the Vatican. Why don&#8217;t they open that wall and let all these illegal immigrants come into the Vatican and then they can start feeding them and give them them free this and free that, and so I think it&#8217;s very hypocritical that they want to tell the United States that they don&#8217;t have a right to protect their language, culture, and borders, but yet they protect their little fancy rich life over there.
Tim: Right, well Karen, I think you should inform the Pope that he has billions, he would be happy to hear that. No, actually I know you were speaking kind of in hyperbole there. The Pope actually does not have this massive, you know, amount of cash, like a lot of folks think. In fact, his budget is is not much more than the budget of, say, the Archdiocese of Chicago, or an archdiocese here in in the United States like New York.
But having said that; well, you have to understand, Karen as Catholics we, just like Jesus, have always and will always have a preference for the poor and for those who don&#8217;t have anyone to speak for them. This is so close to the Heart of Jesus. Yes, we welcome refugees, we welcome folks who don&#8217;t have a place to lay their heads, and so you&#8217;re going&#8211;Karen, you&#8217;re going to hear that from our bishops and from from our Pope that we need to stretch till it hurts, we need to open up our hearts, open up as far as we can, but please Karen, don&#8217;t mistake that for saying that the Catholic Church teaches we should not have borders. In fact that&#8217;s not what Pope Francis teaches, that&#8217;s not what the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, in fact the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that nations have a responsibility to enforce their borders and to protect their people.
So Karen, it would be misguided compassion to just open the borders up and say, &#8220;Oh no we&#8217;re not going to vet anybody;&#8221; in fact, that would be sinful irresponsibility when you have folks that, you know, are wanting to come over that border and kill and rape like we just saw in Rockville, Maryland at a high school, you know, an illegal immigrant 18 years old raping a 14 year-old, I mean that whole situation is absolutely horrid, and the Church, please hear me Karen, is not in favor of that.
We are in favor, as Catholics, of a healthy sort of balance between nations having borders, because, look, if you don&#8217;t have borders, you don&#8217;t have a nation. You can&#8217;t have a culture if you don&#8217;t have borders, all right, you have to have borders and you have to have security. You have a responsibility&#8211;in fact, St. Paul tells us in Romans Chapter 13 verses 1-4 that governments are instituted by God and they wield the sword, and so Paul says, you know, don&#8217;t be fearful, just do what&#8217;s right and you won&#8217;t have to fear the sword coming from the government. But he&#8217;s saying that the governments have this authority to protect their people both from enemies within as well as without, that is, in fighting wars as well as policing within the borders of a nation.
So Karen, I think what happens is, in the media there tends to be a lot of hype&#8211;of course the Pope is going to speak for those who can&#8217;t speak for themselves, immigrants and and so forth, but Pope Francis is not a Democrat and he&#8217;s not a Republican. And I think, praise God for that, right, he does not get into partisan politics here. He is basically calling all sides involved to repent, to reach out as much as we can, reasonably, licitly, but Heavens no, don&#8217;t throw your minds away; and I&#8217;ll take a step further, Karen, I mean, we&#8217;re seeing in Europe right now the results of opening up borders without any&#8211;&#8220;Oh yeah just come on in,&#8221; and you&#8217;re, you know, you&#8217;re reaping the whirlwind as a result.
Hopefully&#8211;and you know what, there&#8217;s not, you know Cy, there&#8217;s not a, you know: &#8220;This is how many immigrants you let in. It&#8217;s this number, and if there&#8217;s one more, NOPE, you&#8217;re against the Bible.&#8221; Right? I mean, that&#8217;s just not the way it works. There will never be an easy &#8220;This is how many immigrants, this is how you vet them, this is it,&#8221; never. We&#8217;re gonna struggle with this, we&#8217;re gonna continue to struggle, but I happen to be very sympathetic to your position, Karen, that we cannot be irresponsible in this, but I think we also need to be open to the heart of Jesus who breaks for these children that are homeless sometimes, a parent has been killed in war, and there, you know, there&#8217;s all sorts of things that need to be, you know, talked about, Karen. I mean, creating safe spaces in the Middle East for example, you know, is one idea that that may be fantastic, as well as opening our doors with a very good vetting process. But God bless you Karen, I hope something I&#8217;ve said has been helpful.
Host: Thank you very much, Karen.

What Does the Catholic Church Teach About Immigration?

Declaring that “faithful men stand up” and “speak up,” Josh Buice, the founder of G3 Ministries, <a href="https://twitter.com/JoshBuice/status/1453685557243043847">argues that</a>
<blockquote>we can be certain that Luther, Calvin, Knox, Tyndale and other figures of the Reformation were not making decisions about defending the faith by calculating their career advancement and protecting their platform.</blockquote>
Buice’s message about basing our actions upon faith, rather than political calculation, is a good one, but (with the possible exception of Tyndale, the only one of the four to die for his beliefs), he could hardly have chosen worse examples than these Protestant Reformers.
In a <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Letters_of_Martin_Luther/k5T8vh2PUPkC?hl=en&amp;gbpv=1&amp;dq=Luther+writes+submissively+to+the+Pope&amp;pg=PA28&amp;printsec=frontcover">May 30, 1518 letter</a>, Martin Luther wrote to Pope Leo X to insist that he wasn’t rejecting papal authority and that the accusations against him were false:
<blockquote>I know, most holy father, that evil reports are being spread about me, some friends having vilified me to your Holiness, as if I were trying to belittle the power of the keys and of the supreme pontiff, therefore I am being accused of being a heretic, a renegade, and a thousand other ill names are being hurled at me, enough to make my ears tingle and my eyes start in my head, but my one source of confidence is an innocent conscience.</blockquote>
Insisting that these accusations against him are untrue, Luther concludes the letter by promising that “my cause hangs on the will of your Holiness, by whose verdict I shall either save or lose my life. Come what may, I shall recognize the voice of your Holiness to be that of Christ, speaking through you.”
But when Leo decided against Luther in June of 1520, Luther changed his tune. Rather than recognizing the voice of the pope to be that of Christ speaking through Leo, Luther instead denounced the pope as the Antichrist, publishing <a href="https://www.famous-trials.com/luther/293-execrablebull">Against the Execrable Bull of the Antichrist</a> in November of that year. Before taking this step, Luther shrewdly drummed up political support. In the summer of 1520, he wrote an “<a href="https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/luther-nobility.asp#The%20Three%20Walls%20Of%20The%20Romanists">Address to the Nobility of the German Nation</a>,” playing on German nationalism, and urging the secular authorities to take greater control of the Catholic Church. Unlike his theological writings (which were in Latin), this was written in German. In the letter, Luther rejected the idea “that the temporal power has no jurisdiction over spirituality” on the grounds that since “the temporal power is baptized as we are, and has the same faith and gospel, we must allow it to be priest and bishop.”
Therefore, he offered a number of suggestions for how secular authority could control the Church, including consolidating or abolishing religious orders like the Dominicans (“Let no more mendicant monasteries be built! God help us! there are too many as it is. Would to God they were all abolished, or at least made over to two or three orders!”); abolishing or tightly controlling the ability of the German faithful to go on pilgrimage to Rome (“Pilgrimages to Rome must be abolished, or at least no one must be allowed to go from his own wish or his own piety, unless his priest, his town magistrate, or his lord has found that there is sufficient reason for his pilgrimage”); and banning of most of the books written by that “blind heathen teacher, Aristotle.” Luther even suggested that “the temporal authorities” should convene their own ecumenical council, and if the pope should resist this secular council, “we must not respect him or his power; and if he should begin to excommunicate and fulminate, we must despise this as the doings of a madman, and, trusting in God, excommunicate and repel him as best we may.”
Protestants are free to make of Luther’s ideas whatever they will, although I suspect that the idea of turning control over the churches to secular authorities no longer sounds as attractive as it did to Luther. My point is simply that between 1518 and 1520, Luther executed a remarkable 180-degree reversal. He pledged fealty to the pope “come what may” when he thought that would benefit his cause, and when it didn’t, he denounced the pope as the Antichrist and pledged support to the worldly authorities instead.
In 1558, John Knox wrote <a href="http://www.swrb.com/newslett/actualNLs/firblast.htm">The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women</a> to denounce the Catholic Queen Mary. Knox denied her legitimacy as queen of England, insisting that women “may never rule nor bear empire above man,” because “woman by the law of God, and by the interpretation of the Holy Ghost, is utterly forbidden to occupy the place of God in the offices aforesaid, which he has assigned to man, whom he has appointed and ordained his lieutenant in earth, excluding from that honour and dignity all women.”
But then an awkward thing happened: Mary died, and her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth I became queen. Would Knox continue his principled opposition to female empire? He would not. He quickly <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_History_of_the_Reformation_of_Religi/HEURAAAAIAAJ?q=&amp;gbpv=1&amp;bsq=%E2%80%9Cthe%20virtuous%20and%20godly%20Elizabeth,%20by%20the%20grace%20of%20God,%20queen%20of%20England,%E2%80%9D%20%22#f=false">wrote to the unhappy queen</a>, addressing her as “the virtuous and godly Elizabeth, by the grace of God, queen of England,” and insisting that nothing in The First Blast “is, nor can be prejudicial to your grace’s just regimen,” a reign for “which most I have thirsted, and for which—as oblivion will suffer—I render thanks unfeignedly unto God.” Elizabeth remained unmoved by Knox’s sycophancy, forbidding him from entering England.
As the nineteenth-century novelist <a href="https://www.djmcadam.com/knox-women.html">Robert Louis Stevenson points out</a>, John Knox (who wrote his treatise from Geneva) had first approached “his great master, Calvin, in ‘a private conversation,’” in which Calvin admitted his own position that “government of women was a deviation from the original and proper order of nature, to be ranked, no less than slavery, among the punishments consequent upon the fall of man.” Once Elizabeth acceded to the throne and Knox fell out of favor, however, <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Letters_of_John_Calvin/Aa1DAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&amp;gbpv=1&amp;bsq=%22of%20the%20book%20I%20had%20not%22">Calvin wrote to her adviser</a> Sir William Cecil to insist that he “had not the slightest suspicion” that Knox was planning to publish a book, and that “it had been published a whole year before [he] was aware of its existence.” To the Swiss Reformer Heinrich Bullinger, however, Calvin admitted that Knox “had talked over these matters with me before he came among you.” This same Calvin critiqued the Church (rightly) for allowing boys as young as ten to become bishops, yet he <a href="https://www.ncregister.com/blog/calvins-fawning-over-a-13-year-old-head-of-the-church-of-england">dedicated two of his biblical commentaries</a> (the Commentary on Isaiah and Commentary on the General Epistles) to the boy-king Edward VI, Elizabeth’s predecessor and elder brother.
This is not to suggest that the Reformers were entirely unprincipled, but it is to suggest that there’s a reason that Tyndale was executed and the other three were not. In an age in which both Catholic and Protestant authorities were willing to violently suppress perceived heresy, men like Tyndale (and, on the Catholic side, St. Thomas More) were willing to die for what they believed. In contrast, Luther, Calvin, and Knox avoided physical suffering in no small part by ingratiating themselves to the politically powerful, even at the cost of some of their own inconvenient principles.

3 Protestant Reformers Put to the Test

Dr. Karlo Broussard addresses a listener&#8217;s concern about discouraging apparitions suggesting few people go to heaven. Karlo clarifies the nature of private revelations and the Church&#8217;s stance on the issue, providing insights into the interpretation of Luke 13:23-25.
Transcript:
There have been a lot of apparitions where few people go to heaven. It feels very discouraging. Is this accurate?
Okay, great question. Well, first of all, I don&#8217;t know which apparitions Beall is referring to. And to be frank and honest, I am not well-read in mystical experiences of the saints and apparitions. So I can&#8217;t even try to guess particularly which ones he&#8217;s referring to. But let&#8217;s assume that we do have these approved apparitions of some of the saints where they&#8217;re communicating this idea that few are saved, many are damned type of thing.
With regard to his question, it feels very discouraging. Is this accurate? Well, this is private revelation. And so far, as we&#8217;re dealing with private revelation, Beall, nor anyone else, would be bound to believe it. And so there would be no need for Beall to be discouraged since he doesn&#8217;t have to believe it, right? There&#8217;s no need for it to cause concern for him because he&#8217;s not bound to believe it. So he could simply dismiss it and just stick with public revelation in what Jesus has revealed to us as definitively taught by the Holy Mother Church. Holy Mother Church has never given us any sort of definitive teaching as to the number of the saved and whether it&#8217;s many or few. Now, if Beall or anyone else still feels the weight of these mystical apparitions, well, then he can know that it does seem to be consistent with what Jesus says in Luke 1323 through 25. Of course, again, the church has never given us any definitive teaching on what Jesus says here and a precise way to interpret it. But on a face value read of the text, Jesus does seem to affirm that few are saved and more are damned. In Luke 1323 through 25, he says, &#8220;And someone said to him, Lord, will those who are saved be few?
And he said to them, Strive to enter by the narrow door, for many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able.&#8221; Now, the question is, will those who are saved that is going to heaven be few? Jesus seems to answer in the affirmative. He seems to be saying that that door or gate through which you enter to enter into eternal life is very difficult and less. And the number of those who enter are less than those who do not enter it. And so Jesus seems to be saying more will be damned as opposed to those who will be saved.
But again, the church gives us no definitive teaching on this issue. And so Catholics are permitted to disagree with one another as to precisely whether Jesus is actually affirming more or damned and fewer or saved or not. So boring any alternative attempted interpretation of how to read this text in a different way than what it seems to be, as far as my journey of knowledge and my current knowledge, Jesus seems to be affirming more or damned. But again, Catholics are permitted to disagree on this precise interpretation of the text because the church has not given us any sort of ordinary or definitive guidance on this.
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Most Will NOT Get to Heaven? (What Apparitions Say)

What is the Catholic stance of Miaphysitism?

If Mary is the new Ark of the Covenant, could we correlate the story of someone touching the old ark and dying to Joseph potentially touching Mary to him potentially dying?

Would it be correct to say that the second person of the Trinity had a human nature since the beginning since God is outside of time?

My brother is into Krishna and reading a lot about it. Where can I start on engaging him?

Can you recommend a good Catholic audio bible?

Who authorized the removal of books in the bible?

Are dating show marriages grounds for annulment?

What is being baptized in the Holy Spirit?

How can Satan be in God’s presence in the story of Job if no unclean thing can be in God’s presence?

<div>Why did Cornelius receive the Holy Spirit before baptism?</div><div>This is the one exception in the New Testament where the Holy Spirit is given without the sacrament of baptism. But the exception was fitting, given the need for a public demonstration of God’s approval of the admission of Gentiles into the Church without the conditions of submitting to the Jewish ceremonial laws.
The two prior divine interventions were both subjective: Peter’s vision (Acts 10:9-16) and Cornelius’ vision (Acts 10:3-7). With the public evidence of God’s approval, the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem who were hesitant to admit Gentiles into the Church (Acts 11:2, 3) could no longer be reasonably opposed to their admission. Many ceased their opposition (Acts 11:4-18), but a few extremists remained (Acts 15:1-2), which gave rise to the Council of Jerusalem, where Peter settled the debate (Acts 15:6-29).
This event is normally used by Protestants to undermine the Catholic belief that baptism is necessary for salvation. But such an attempt is futile. The Catholic Church recognizes that God is not “bound by his sacraments” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1257). God can administer the graces of salvation apart from the sacraments in ways known only to him (see CCC 848). Only those to whom the sacraments have been revealed are bound (see CCC 847). Baptism is therefore the ordinary means of salvation (see 1 Pet. 3:21).
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Why Did Cornelius Receive the Holy Spirit Before Baptism?

Guest host, Chis Check, asks Fr. Hugh to defend praying for the dead. Fr. Hugh explains why praying for the dead is every Christian&#8217;s duty.

Praying for the Dead

Are sins you forget in confession still forgiven?

We all came from Adam and Eve, why do we have so many races?

What is the proper order of Sacraments when received as an adult?

How can we know what the unforgivable sin is?

How can I discuss Catholic Baptism and rebaptism with my non-Catholic Wife?

Why do Catholics say Christ is present “body, blood, soul and divinity”?

Is it always a Mortal Sin to miss Mass, or can you be excused based on age?

Ask a Priest

What Happens When Someone Confesses Murder to a Priest?

In 1830 Joseph Smith published the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/problems-with-the-book-of-mormon">Book of Mormon</a> which became one of the foundational texts for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon Church.
There are <a href="https://www.catholic.com/audio/cot/3-reasons-im-not-mormon">lots of theological problems</a> with Mormonism, but one of my biggest concerns is historical since Smith claims that the Book of Mormon is a divinely revealed text that gives an alternate history of the Americas and of Jesus Christ’s Incarnation.
The book follows the descendants of Lehi, a righteous man living at the time of the prophet Jeremiah, who traveled with his family from Jerusalem across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. The Book of Mormon is divided into chapters based on the allegedly different authors who recorded the history of Lehi’s descendants. The two primary lines of Lehi were the Nephites and the Lamanites, both of whom built elaborate cities and engaged in several massive and violent wars with each other. The high point of the Book of Mormon takes place in 3rd Nephi, when Jesus appears to the Nephites shortly after his Resurrection and preaches the gospel to them.
The book concludes with the testimony of Moroni, who was the only Nephite to survive a final battle with the Lamanites in the fifth century (the Lamanites then became the ancestors of modern Native Americans). Before he died, Moroni gathered the golden plates that recorded the history of his people and buried them on a hillside. After his death, Moroni became an angel and later revealed to Joseph Smith the location of the plates (which turned out to be in upstate New York).
It&#8217;s an interesting story, but one reason I think it is just a story is because there is no Mormon consensus on where these historical events took place. In short, in order to believe in the Book of Mormon I need a map of the Book of Mormon and there isn’t one. Anywhere.
Most Bibles contain maps illustrating where important biblical events took place. You can visit the ruins of cities described in the Bible. If you get atheist, Christian, and Jewish scholars together, they can roughly agree on where the events allegedly took place and confirm the existence of cities and sites in those places, even if an atheist or a Jew denies certain miracles or historical events took place there.
Nothing comparable can be said about the Book of Mormon.
Some Mormons say the events of the book take place across North and South America. Others say it took place in Central America, in Panama or Mexico. And still other say the events of the book took place in the Heartland of America. That’s why some Mormons are conducting expeditions in Southeast Iowa to uncover the ancient city of Zaramehla that purportedly had 100,000 people living in it in the fourth century, which would have made it one of the largest cities in ancient North America. But so far, the expeditions haven’t been promising. In fact, <a href="https://mit.irr.org/file/national-geographic-society-statement-on-book-of-mormon">according to the National Geographic Society</a>, “Archaeologists and other scholars have long probed the hemisphere’s past, and the society does not know of anything found so far that has substantiated the Book of Mormon.”
To put this into perspective, it would be very difficult to defend the Bible if some Christians said the city of Jerusalem was in Israel, others said it was in southern France, and still others said it was in India.
Because of this, some Mormon scholars lean towards the view the book is an allegory and not historical; but that threatens to turn Mormonism into something as irrelevant as Unitarianism that doesn’t need to be defended because it doesn’t really make claims about anything.
So, the next time a Mormon missionary asks you to read the Book of Mormon, ask them to point show you on a map where the events of the book took place. This helps redirect the conversation away from trying to prove something with “warm feelings” from reading a book and instead following the evidence wherever it leads.

My Biggest Problem with the Book of Mormon

Fire up your imagination for a moment and imagine you are standing on a busy street corner with a handful of rosaries. Most people pass by hurriedly, but a stranger walks by and makes eye contact long enough for you to ask a simple question: &#8220;What do you think of the Catholic Church?&#8221;
What sort of responses would you receive? My guess is that many, if not most of the responses would be critical of the Church’s moral teachings, especially in the areas of sex, marriage, and human life. Would you be prepared to confidently respond to those criticisms?
Sound arguments often begin with basic facts that your interlocutor is likely to agree with. The late Catholic apologist Frank Sheed identifies one such key principle for defending the Church’s moral teachings. He <a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/society-and-sanity-frank-sheed/1113952980">writes</a>, &#8220;Our treatment of anything must depend, in the last resort, on what we think it is.&#8221; This is the first principle we must establish before entering the depths of rational argument. From that follows another principle on which all moral arguments hinge: our treatment of man must depend on what we think he is.
So then: What are we that makes us so special?
<h3>1. An immortal soul</h3>
In his book, In the Beginning, Pope Benedict XVI affirms that the inner unity between faith and reason is reflected in the revealed story of creation and the scientific theory of evolution. Science can inform us about man’s development as a physical being, but alongside the discoveries of science, the disciplines of theology and philosophy can tell us more about man: that he has an immortal soul infused by God. Therefore, man is a unity of body and spirit, which makes him utterly distinct from the rest of creation. &#8220;Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution,&#8221; muses G.K. Chesterton.
With this rational soul, man alone can know by his intellect, love through his will. Unlike the animals, we can freely choose, and we can deliberate before choosing.
Another difference is that human souls are incorruptible, which means they are immortal: death of the body is not the end for us. This potentiality to “share in God’s blessed life” for all of eternity sets us apart from animals (CCC 1).
<h3>2. Made like God</h3>
In the opening chapter of Genesis, God says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness&#8221; (1:26). But what exactly is God like? And what are the particular attributes of God that we similarly possess?
God is infinite and perfect. Therefore, to describe him, we use words such as all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving. God thereby possesses power, knowledge, and love without limit. We too are able—by virtue of the spiritual powers of our will and intellect—to exercise power, obtain knowledge, and will the good of others, albeit to a finite degree. You can see these “likenesses” to God fully manifested in distinctly human activities such as artistic endeavors, academic pursuits, and charity work.
But that&#8217;s not all. The opening to Genesis also introduces us to a theology of the body. The Church, especially through the teachings of Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II, teaches us that in our bodies we possess the sexual makeup through which we can enter into free, total, faithful, and fruitful union with another. This nuptial love profoundly images the free, total, faithful, and fruitful relationship among the three eternal persons of the Blessed Trinity.
<h3>3. Saved by God</h3>
“Christian, recognize your dignity,” commands the Catechism (1691). There is perhaps no better and direct way to recognize your dignity than by looking at a crucifix.
“The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me,” wrote St. Paul (Gal. 2:20). Just as God gave himself for Paul, so too did God suffer and die to save you. God desires for all men to be saved (1 Tim. 2:4), and along with God’s desire for all men to be saved is the desire inside every man and woman to be saved. As C.S. Lewis puts it, “He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, he would have done no less.”
Christ’s death on the cross both proves and symbolizes our human worth in addition to God’s undying love for us. Not only are we loved by God; we are redeemed by him. We are now free—with the necessary graces readily available—to fulfill God’s original plan for us: to “partake in his divine nature” and spend all of eternity perfected in the bliss of heaven.
Now back to that imaginary street corner. Do you feel a bit more prepared to respond to the objections you will undoubtedly encounter? Remember: your objective in that scenario (or any evangelistic situation) is not ultimately to “convert on the spot.” Your task is really to plant little mental seeds for consideration. If you find yourself at a loss for words, then I suggest starting with Frank Sheed’s first principle: that our treatment of anything must depend on what we think it is, from which it follows that our treatment of man must depend on what we think he is.
What is man? Man is a union of body and spirit purposed for heaven. Only from this starting point can the truths about what is right and good for man as man become clear.

You’re Better than Any Animal

Karlo Broussard, author of The New Relativism, answers a caller who asks if people who never knew about Jesus have the chance to be saved.
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Transcript:
I have a question: &#8220;How can a person who never knew Jesus Christ get to heaven?&#8221;
Well, one way in which that could take place is if God sends a prophet to miraculously be present to that person who never knew Jesus and proclaim Jesus to that person, and that person know Jesus right before death, accept Jesus, and go to heaven. Another way would be for God, by way of a miracle and divine power, to infuse knowledge within the mind of that person who never knew Jesus, to know about Jesus and be able to make a choice whether to follow Jesus or not. And if follow Jesus, believe in Jesus, ascend to Jesus, and die in that belief and friendship with Jesus, then heaven would be His. 
Or another way would be in some mysterious way that we do not know, whereby God is able to give the grace of salvation to someone who is not responsible for his or her ignorance of Jesus Christ. For that person, if that person is come honestly seeking truth in the ways that he or she knows how, and is living in accord with that truth according to the capabilities that they have, responding to whatever temporary helps God is giving that person, even though that person doesn&#8217;t have explicit knowledge of Jesus Christ, it is possible that God can communicate the grace of salvation to that person. Because ultimately, Tom, God knows whether that person in the heart of hearts, whether that person is fundamentally oriented towards truth, if oriented towards truth and goodness, then ultimately oriented towards God himself. And if that is the case, and that person has not made any positive act of the will at the moment of death to oppose truth or goodness, as he or she knows truth and goodness, then that person is not positively opposed to God, not positively rejecting God in any way. And so God could possibly communicate the graces of salvation to that person, knowing the inner movements of the heart and the mind, and whether the heart and the mind is ultimately ordered to him who is truth and goodness itself. And so these would be some ways, possible ways, in which a person who never knew about Jesus could actually go to heaven. 
And keep in mind this, lest there be any confusion, whatever grace that person is saved by, the grace that would perfect the soul and give it, you know, the grace that would make it rightly ordered to God as its supernatural end, that grace would come from Jesus Christ and no other. Since our Lord has said in John 14.6, &#8220;I am the way, the truth, and the life.&#8221;

Can You Be Saved Without Knowing Jesus?

Tim Staples discusses St. Thomas Aquinas&#8217;s Five Proofs for the existence of God with an atheist caller who is seeking clarification, focusing particularly on the third way, the idea of a necessary being, its attributes, how we can know that this necessary being is the God of the Bible, and finally how we can reconcile God&#8217;s ultimate perfection and love with the apparent harshness He shows in the Old Testament.

St. Thomas Aquinas’s Five Ways as a Path Back to Catholicism

Today is Giving Tuesday, a global day of generosity and the perfect time to reflect on the Catholic Church’s remarkable <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/catholic-charity">legacy of charity</a>. From its humble beginnings, the Church has taught—and carried out—Jesus’s commandment to care for the poor and others who too often are forgotten by society. And as individual members of the body of Christ, we are obliged to do our part as we follow the call and example of Our Lord and his Church, each according to his own means.
Yet, critics sometimes question whether the Church or its members do enough, pointing to the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/is-the-vatican-rich">Vatican’s treasures</a> or the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/video/is-the-vatican-hoarding-wealth">Church’s perceived wealth</a> as reasons for doubt. Frankly, many such skeptics are first driven by a disdain for the Church’s religious teachings and then extrapolate their hostility into <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-wealth-of-the-church">poorly founded criticisms</a> of its charitable works. However, the truth is that for nearly 2,000 years, Catholic charity has been changing the world for the better.
The Catholic Church’s commitment to charity is as old as Christianity itself. While Jesus walked the earth, he exhorted his followers to serve the least among us (Matthew 25:31-46). In the Acts of the Apostles after Our Lord’s death, resurrection, and ascension to heaven, the early Church established organized community support—those who had more resources shared with those who had less—ensuring &#8220;there was not a needy person among them&#8221; (Acts 4:34-35). This spirit of giving grew into a central and distinguishing characteristic of the Christian life, a tradition that endures today and touches nearly every facet of the human condition in a positive way.
Over the centuries, the Catholic Church has founded <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-christian-origins-of-the-hospital">hospitals</a>, schools, orphanages, and food programs, many of which remain pillars of their communities. Through not only large global organizations but also local parish outreach programs, the Church continues to serve millions worldwide, addressing issues like hunger, disaster relief, education, and healthcare.
In America alone, Catholic Charities USA serves over 15 million people annually, regardless of faith. Every year, the Knights of Columbus donates nearly 50 million hours of service to charitable efforts around the world. Globally, the Church is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_charities">second to none</a> in her consistent advocacy for human dignity and works of mercy.
Jesus commanded his followers to &#8220;sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven&#8221; (Luke 18:22). This represents deep sacrificial love, another distinguishing feature of Christian living. It is foundational to Catholic teaching on almsgiving and particularly relevant today as every Christian is called to participate in this mission of charity, whether through personal service, prayer, or financial support.
This <a href="http://givecatholic.com/">Giving Tuesday</a>, we invite you to partner with Catholic Answers as we explain the truth of the Catholic faith, evangelize a culture which needs Jesus Christ more than ever, and defend every aspect of the Catholic faith—including the Church’s mission of charity. Let&#8217;s show the world that the Church’s commitment to loving our neighbor is as vibrant today as it has been for centuries.

Catholics Should Rule Giving Tuesday

<div>May I know which saint is meant for protection, spreads joy, and is a good counselor/listener? </div><div>A great holy one for you would be the most recent American blessed, Bl. Solanus Casey, a Capuchin Franciscan friar of Detroit (of the same order as St. Padre Pio, and very similar in some ways). He was the doorkeeper of his monastery and gave out great advice and consolation to hundreds of thousands over the years. He was a miracle worker and great intercessor and spent countless hours listening to people&#8217;s woes. His spirituality was centered on joyful gratitude for all God&#8217;s plans in our lives.
So I would suggest you take Bl. Solanus, a fresh new blessed of the Church, beatified in December 2017, as your joy-giving protector and counselor. You can find more information about him <a href="http://solanuscasey.org/who-is-father-solanus">here</a>.
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Why Is Solanus Casey a Good Intercessor?

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DAY 102
CHALLENGE
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“Science is superior to faith, as shown by the way Christians adapt parts of the Bible to the findings of science.”
DEFENSE
All truth is God’s truth, and the fact that we learn new things in one field does not mean it is superior to another field.
This is true within the scientific disciplines themselves. What is learned in one field has ripples that affect others. For example, a discovery in physics may impact astronomy or chemistry. The reverse is also true. The scientific fields thus exist in a state of creative tension with respect to one another, and this is true of every other area of study, including theology. Yet this does not mean that one form of study is superior to another. They are all explorations of different aspects of the truth.
When we learn something new in one field, it is natural to seek to relate it to other fields, including religion. If a scientific discovery is well established and seems to contradict a common religious view, it is natural to revisit that view and see if we have understood the matter correctly (see Day 184).
Thus when astronomical discoveries suggested that the earth might not be the center of the universe, or paleontological and biological dis- coveries suggested that the earth might be much older than commonly thought and that biological evolution occurs, it was natural to revisit certain texts of Scripture to see whether they had been understood correctly.
In both cases, a careful reading showed that they were not, in fact, in conflict with the new scientific perspectives. Passages that talk about the sun rising and setting merely describe natural phenomena according to the language of appearances and do not imply the motion of the sun around the earth any more than we do today when we speak of “sunrise” and “sunset.” Similarly, long before the rise of modern science, perceptive exegetes like St. Augustine had pointed out features of Genesis 1 that indicated its days were not literal (see Day 90; cf. St. Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis 1:10[21–22]).
Investigating the proper way to harmonize Scripture and science is no different in principle than investigating how to harmonize the discoveries of physics with those of astronomy. The findings of every field are properly understood in harmony with the others.
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Science and Scripture

One doctrinal position separating the fractured body of Christ on earth is the issue of original sin. Non-Catholics, such as the late evangelical Bible scholar <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3IkEyhp9FA">Dr. Michael Heiser</a> and many <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DJM5gyRqBc&amp;t=2022s">Eastern Orthodox</a> brothers and sisters, argue that Adam’s and Eve’s sin in the Garden transmitted to all people death alone. Nothing else was passed on. Catholics, on the other hand, say that Adam also passed on a corrupted human nature—that our hearts are stony and selfish instead of overflowing with supernatural love and life (sanctifying grace). Let’s look at Scripture and Tradition to see the evidence for the Catholic point of view.
First, original sin can be seen in Genesis 3, where God walks in the Garden of Eden with the first humans in the same environment as the tree of life (v. 8). God’s moving presence indicates his close, positive relationship with humanity. The tree of life could indicate not only immortality, but the supernatural life of God within Adam. When Adam and Eve disobey God, they (and humanity) are cast out of his presence in the Garden. An angel blocks humanity’s entrance back into communion with God (Gen. 3:24). The tree of life is left with God alone. All of humanity grows outside the Garden, and since communion with the walking God is not described outside the Garden, Adam and every other person passes on a human nature devoid of communion with God and immortality. Humans’ location alone suggests this.
Second, original sin can be gleaned from Genesis 2:17’s description of death. This text says that Adam will “die” if he disobeys God’s command not to consume the forbidden fruit. Yet when Adam disobeyed God, he did not die in the sense that we usually understand death. He was cast out of the Garden of Eden and had a couple of children (Gen. 4:1-2). So the question naturally presents itself: what died? God’s life within him. The perfect, otherworldly love that he had radiating out from his being was snuffed out. Adam did in fact die, but spiritually. His communion with God, walking around in the Garden with him, ended. Since humans can pass on to the next generation only what they themselves possess, so every person afterward received a lifeless and selfish heart.
This idea of spiritual death from Gen. 2:17 pairs well with the writings of the earliest Christians. For instance, the <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/02013.htm">Shepherd of Hermas</a> (first century) says, “Before a man bears the name of the Son of God, he is dead” (3:9:16). Spiritual death or a wounded human nature is a real thing. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Romans-Ancient-Christian-Commentary-Scripture/dp/083081356X/ref=sr_1_2?crid=1QQE6R0XAHQMY&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.MrA9b_jXHAjb3wNOwGUSA_2lmmYEsKgCPsxtJUeTl9CkgogmtyS4IhiaIa88NkLClyWgCFuh23-Vms4N2qqNQn3HI1W9I8aVzzd_ZoHMcleeUDh49TwnQj2LJUHja4bC19FK0pXbTs0iazvDcZwm33sxhY5Xpo1UU1poyfqOXuDYdF6TZFeabPvOkQrr-hHhKXV3atBoEglkWxtg9jNzGQz5YAkIJld5mwUIqQyUfkw.Popbz_x1hLgwzRdg54KOeyQi7jxeO5aZRQMCv80I34o&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=ancient+christian+commentary+on+scripture+romans&amp;qid=1750817695&amp;s=books&amp;sprefix=ancient+christian+commentary+on+scriotpreu+raomns%2Cstripbooks%2C112&amp;sr=1-2">Pseudo-Constantius</a> says, “All men sinned [quoting Rom. 5:12]. . . . The apostle is here referring to the death of the soul, which is the death Adam suffered when he transgressed” (137). This seems to be a clear interpretation of Gen. 2:17 as a reference to spiritual death. <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103323.htm">St. Irenaeus of Lyons</a> claims that the “life” dwelling within Adam was lost due to disobedience—that man was “created by God that he might live” but lost that “life” through the “serpent” who “corrupted” him (Against Heresies 3.23.1). This corruption could be taken as original sin: that loss of God’s life that took place at the expulsion of Adam from the Garden. This “corrupted” Adam, for he was no longer possessing God’s interior life of love within him.
In his Catechesis on Original Sin, <a href="https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/summary-of-pope-john-paul-iis-catechesis-on-original-sin-8343">Pope St. John Paul II</a> says that God’s life was eliminated from Adam and the rest of humanity at the Fall. He says, “Sanctifying grace has ceased to constitute that supernatural enrichment of that nature which the first parents” possessed (V, 5). God’s life is gone, which implies that man is today born in a “state of sinfulness” (II, 2). The pope references the <a href="https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/trent/fifth-session.htm">Council of Trent</a>’s “Decree Concerning Original Sin,” which said that Adam experienced a “death of the soul,” which he “transmitted to the whole human race” (Session 5.2). Notice the strong similarity to Genesis 2:17.
Later in the text, the pope quotes <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/using-the-bible-to-explain-original-sin">Romans 5:18-19</a> as an indication of original sin. This text points out an inseparable link between Adam’s sin and the state of every human person. St. Paul says that Adam’s sin led to all men being made sinners and being labelled as condemned. Adam’s “divorced” location from God’s Garden of Eden, as with every human being, implies this. An inherited human nature that is corrupted and selfish can be called these things.
Now, lest this seem unfair, the Catechism clarifies that “original sin is called ‘sin’ only in an analogical sense: it is a sin ‘contracted’ and not ‘committed’—a state and not an act” (404). Although Christians did not commit Adam’s sin in the Garden, the early Christian writers bring out the radical connection between Adam and all of humanity.
These writers say striking things. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Romans-Ancient-Christian-Commentary-Scripture/dp/083081356X/ref=sr_1_1?adgrpid=1342504259949627&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.WotKHRkkD6lAEAnch1p5lglO2INi8rD4pLPQhnKB_LKsjAaMeFDktJfjtlUZrtUSqCITh7x15soB8PXvi3HK8pgdAdKNN1QkYaP2WmnvCpxnaD1zYsIwCyyZFU6YM-pEHzJxT3JxdkWolKLFc_CPHmcavXjME4jP4bK3zKa5yFqDK-iQDuhK0kyCxe8VzSAsNq_zxrxLBYAzbsTa8B9hYdULYP3va9JQXN9XIpu7XPE.AudwU5ASP5Az-cu-87LMnPTzAlFIz_JmFgojKXJWeGM&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;hvadid=83906755342709&amp;hvbmt=be&amp;hvdev=c&amp;hvlocphy=45212&amp;hvnetw=o&amp;hvqmt=e&amp;hvtargid=kwd-83906856480574%3Aloc-190&amp;hydadcr=8296_13501982&amp;keywords=ancient+christian+commentary+romans&amp;mcid=75d925246587389f9fc200563542a928&amp;msclkid=263c9ee98f7b125b99a0f6b2e63762f8&amp;qid=1750821201&amp;sr=8-1">St. Ambrose</a> (c. A.D. 376) says, “In Adam I fell, in Adam I was cast out of paradise, in Adam I died” (136). <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/03125.htm">Tertullian</a> (207-212) speaks of humans being either “in Adam” or “in Christ” (Against Marcion 5:10). These words emphasize the mysterious collective reality to human beings. There seem to be two groups: the “body” of Adam and the “body” of Christ.
It was not only these early Christian writers who held to the idea of original sin. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Catholic-Dogma-Dr-Ludwig/dp/B002KLED1O">Ludwig Ott</a> notes that St. Augustine, in Contra Julianum, quotes Irenaeus, Cyprian, Reticius of Autun, Olympius, Hilary, Ambrose, Innocent I, Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, Basil, and Jerome as teaching original sin (109). They all would recognize the inherent link between Adam and his descendants.
The God of love and the tree of life remain in the Garden, but people are born on the peripheries. Outside the Garden of Eden, no human can properly be considered to be filled with God’s life at conception. Adam lost that gift, and his progeny receive what he had—a human nature without friendship with God. More could be said about what the bad fruits of original sin lost (e.g., concupiscence), and more arguments could be brought forth (e.g., Ps. 51:5), but this should help with discussions between Catholics and non-Catholics.

Catholics Are Right About Original Sin

<div>If I pawn a blessed wedding band, pay it off, and get it back, is it still blessed?</div><div>The Code of Canon Law:
<blockquote>Sacred objects, which are designated for divine worship by dedication or blessing, are to be treated reverently and are not to be employed for profane or inappropriate use even if they are owned by private persons (can. 1171).</blockquote>
It would appear, in my opinion, that a blessed object would lose its blessing if it is used for a secular (i.e., profane) use. The pawning of a blessed ring of matrimony for even the temporary use of money would be to use the blessed ring for a secular purpose, and therefore the ring would need to be blessed again.
</div>

Does a Pawned Wedding Ring Lose Its Blessing?

Christians talk a lot about the gospel, but what actually is it?
An easy answer is that it’s “good news.” That’s what the Greek and Hebrew terms translated gospel mean, and we get the English word gospel from roots that mean “good news.”
But what is the good news that the gospel contains? What is it, specifically?
That’s where things get fuzzy. Christians don’t have a single, clear definition for what the gospel is. There are several different uses for the term.
This is a problem because St. Paul has stern things to say about people who don’t understand the gospel correctly. He writes,
<blockquote>I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.
But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.
As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed (Gal. 1:6-9).</blockquote>
In Paul’s view, anyone who has a fundamentally different gospel is to be condemned and ejected from the Christian community. So making sure that you have a correct understanding of the gospel is very important. Yet this is where we run into trouble.
Sometimes people use the term very broadly. For example, GotQuestions <a href="https://www.gotquestions.org/what-is-the-gospel.html">states</a>, “The gospel is, broadly speaking, the whole of Scripture.”
The gospel is a good thing, and Scripture is a good thing, so it sounds inspiring to link the two concepts and say that all of Scripture belongs to the gospel. It could even sound irreverent to propose that there are things in Scripture that are not part of the gospel.
But if you think about it, problems with the claim emerge. There are verses in the New Testament that say that Andrew was the brother of Simon Peter, but do we really want to say that the historical fact that Andrew was the brother of Peter—in some acceptable, first-century definition of the term “brother”—is part of the gospel?
What about Deuteronomy 3:11, which says that Og king of Bashan had a bed that was nine cubits long? Is the length of a pagan king’s bed really part of the gospel? Most Christians would not suppose so. It may be interesting that Og’s bed was nine cubits—or between thirteen and fourteen feet long—but this curious fact is scarcely something that warrants being considered an element in the gospel.
What’s going on in this definition is a pious identification of one sacred concept—the gospel—with another—Scripture. But this is not how Scripture itself uses the term gospel.
Even GotQuestions expresses reservations by saying that the gospel is the whole of Scripture “broadly speaking,” suggesting that this is an extended use of the term rather than how you’d define it properly.
Of course, language changes over time, and communities can use terms however they see fit. If some groups identify all of Scripture with the gospel, they can do that. But we need to be honest about the fact that this is not how Scripture uses the term.
Other Christians who have a very broad understanding of the gospel make it identical with the whole of Christian teaching. Any doctrine of the faith is part of “the gospel” on this usage.
For example, the Lutheran Book of Concord says that the term gospel is used two ways in Scripture and that
<blockquote>in the one case the word [gospel] is used in such a way that we understand by it the entire teaching of Christ, our Lord, which in his public ministry on earth and in the New Testament he ordered to be observed (Book of Concord, Formula of Concord 2:5:4).</blockquote>
Here the term gospel would be identified either with all the teachings of the Christian faith or at least with those taught by Jesus himself.
But it’s pretty easy to see that this is not how the Bible is using the term. To give an example I often use, one truth of the Christian faith is the existence of angels. Jesus himself taught that angels exist. But the biblical authors wouldn’t say that the existence of angels is part of the gospel.
One reason is that the existence of angels is taught in the Old Testament, but the gospel is something new. It hasn’t been with us all through redemptive history. Whatever the good news of the gospel is, it’s something associated with the New Testament, not the Old.
Another problem with this approach is that if St. Paul is correct that anyone with an incorrect understanding of the gospel is to be regarded as accursed, and if the gospel is identified with the whole of Christian doctrine, then you won’t be able to have fellowship with anyone who disagrees with you on any point of doctrine.
The one point of doctrine on which you disagree with someone means he has a false gospel, and you need to regard him as accursed and kick him out.
Most Christians don’t hold this view. In the Protestant community, it is common to say that Christians can have different opinions on doctrines as long as they agree on “the essentials.”
The trouble comes when trying to identify what counts as an essential. People have different views on what is essential. For example, in many Protestant communities, the idea that we are saved strictly by God’s grace and not by our own efforts is common.
This claim is true, but in some circles it has led to an identification between the gospel and the concept of grace. You’ll recall that the Lutheran Book of Concord stated that the term gospel is used in two senses, one of which is identified with the whole of Christian doctrine. The other, more restricted sense is based on a Lutheran tendency to divide biblical teaching up into two categories that Luther referred to as law and gospel. The Book of Concord continues:
<blockquote>In addition, however, the word “gospel” is also used in another (that is, in a strict) sense. Here it does not include the proclamation of repentance but solely the preaching of God’s grace. . . .
Everything that preaches about our sin and the wrath of God, no matter how or when it happens, is the proclamation of the law. On the other hand, the gospel is a proclamation that shows and gives nothing but grace and forgiveness in Christ (Book of Concord, Formula of Concord 2:5:6, 12).</blockquote>
On this view, law is anything that discusses our sin or God’s wrath, whereas gospel is anything that deals with grace and forgiveness in Christ.
It’s okay if Lutherans want to use the terms law and gospel this way in their own community and classify different verses in Scripture according to these two categories. But we need to be exegetically honest about the fact that this is not how Scripture itself employs these terms. They are definitions that come from a later age and are being used to classify Scripture, but Scripture does not conceptualize the terms in this way.
For example, the primary meaning of the term law in the New Testament is a reference not to human sin and divine wrath, but simply to the Law of Moses that God gave during the Exodus. Although that law does have things to say about sin and wrath, it also contains promises of grace and provisions for forgiveness.
Another problem with the idea of being united on essentials while allowing diversity on non-essentials is that people also tend to identify their own movement’s distinctive doctrines as essentials and thus as parts of the gospel.
For example, some Pentecostals use the phrase “full gospel” and hold that many Protestants are not preaching all the elements they need to for a full presentation of the gospel. One element they hold is part of the gospel is the idea that God continues to give miraculous gifts. GotQuestions.org <a href="https://www.gotquestions.org/Full-Gospel-church.html">explains</a>:
<blockquote>A “Full Gospel Christian” believes that the Holy Spirit is still doing everything he was doing in the New Testament Gospels: He is still healing, giving the gift of tongues, performing miracles, etc.</blockquote>
So you don’t have the full gospel unless you include miraculous gifts in it. Most Protestants don’t teach this, and so for Full Gospel Christians, most Christians have a truncated version of the gospel.
On the other hand, Calvinists stress what they refer to as “the doctrines of grace.” These are teachings connected with grace and predestination that they refer to as the “five points of Calvinism” and summarize with the acronym TULIP (total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, perseverance of the saints).
Many Calvinists think that the doctrines of grace are so important that you have to teach them to have a correct understanding of the gospel. I’ve known Calvinists who hold that, and if you point out that this would imply that non-Calvinists don’t actually have the gospel, they’ll sheepishly admit that this is the case: Non-Calvinists don’t really teach the gospel.
These two positions identify the gospel with the views of particular groups—certain Pentecostals and Calvinists—but most don’t identify the gospel so narrowly with their own movement.
Many seek to identify the gospel with something broader—something most or all Protestants could get on board with.
For example, there are slogans in Protestantism like sola fide (Latin, “by faith alone”). The claim is that we are justified by faith alone, and this was a big point of controversy during the Reformation.
To justify breaking away from the Catholic Church, Protestants accused it of teaching a false gospel. They said Paul preached the idea of justification by faith alone, and so sola fide expressed an essential element of the gospel.
If anyone taught that anything besides faith was involved in justification, it was argued that he was in some degree engaging in self-justification and adding “works” to the gospel, making it a false understanding. They then appealed to the passage from Galatians where Paul condemns anyone with a different understanding of the gospel.
There are a number of problems with this understanding, and we don’t have time to go through them all at the moment. However, it’s worth pointing out that “by faith alone” is not the language of Scripture. The phrase is used only once—in James 2:24—where it is rejected.
It’s also worth pointing out that Catholics don’t have a problem with the formula “faith alone,” provided you understand the faith in question correctly. Pope Benedict XVI stated,
<blockquote>Luther’s phrase “faith alone” is true, if it is not opposed to faith in charity, in love. . . . So it is that, in the letter to the Galatians, in which he primarily developed his teaching on justification, that St. Paul speaks of “faith that works through love” (General Audience, Nov. 19, 2008, quoting Gal. 5:6).</blockquote>
In light of growing Catholic-Protestant rapprochement, some Protestants have backed off on the necessity of the “faith alone” formula and been more open to the idea that the gospel merely requires that it’s God’s grace that saves us. They might identify the gospel with another Reformation-era slogan, the idea that we’re saved sola gratia (“by grace alone”).
One of the most common ways of presenting the gospel is that it is the message of eternal salvation. It’s all about sin and forgiveness through Jesus Christ.
The idea is that you are a sinner, and you cannot save yourself. If left to your own devices, you will spend eternity in hell. That’s the bad news many preachers say one needs to understand to appreciate the good news or gospel.
The good news is that God has not left us to our own devices. He sent his Son Jesus Christ to die for us, and so he graciously offers to forgive our sins if we repent and believe in his Son. That way, we can be saved from sin and from hell and spend eternity with God in heaven.
It so happens that every one of the claims I’ve just described is true. But is this the way the New Testament conceptualizes the gospel, or does the New Testament understand it some other way?
We’ll explore that question next time.

Misunderstanding the Gospel

In this video, Joe Heschmeyer responds to a caller who asks whether it’s okay to become Catholic even without fully understanding everything. Joe offers insight on faith, trust, and what it really means to be ready to enter the Church, in a conversation hosted by Cy Kellett.
Transcript:
Caller: I am not Catholic, I guess, because I was unfortunately taught somewhere along the line that the Catholic faith is heretical and idolatrous and all these terrible things. But I am working my way back home, which is why I&#8217;m calling.
Cy: Well, you&#8217;re working your way back home, but there&#8217;s a lot of people working on you, too, on the other side. There&#8217;s a lot of people praying for you to get into the church. So God bless you, brother.
Joe: Yes, well, are there major areas that are still like kind of obstacles or speed bumps for you?
Caller: So I guess. And I&#8217;ve already started to make inroads. I mean, I&#8217;ve been going to Mass, I talked to the father, talked to a deacon, you know, so I&#8217;m really kind of on that journey to come back. However, the question really is, is it okay that I don&#8217;t fully embrace other dogmas? Not because I am rejecting them or intellectually just opposing them, it&#8217;s simply that, you know, it&#8217;s just. It&#8217;s a complete paradigm shift. And it&#8217;s something that I simply has not been part of my faith. Namely, of course, you know, the Marian doctrines, you know, praying to saints. So there are a few things there that I know. Like, I don&#8217;t even. I wouldn&#8217;t even know how to begin. I can&#8217;t even see myself praying to Mary. And I again said that I don&#8217;t want to. It&#8217;s still going to be, you know, those are the next steps, I suppose. But I guess should I still proceed?
Joe: Yeah. No, no. That&#8217;s a great question. And the answer is yes. So here&#8217;s what I always tell people in terms of how they should know if they&#8217;re ready to become Catholic.
And I start by just saying, well, consider how you would know if you were ready to follow Jesus and become a Christian. It would be more than you heard some interesting things that he said, but it would be less than you understand everything that he teaches, because the disciples of Jesus don&#8217;t.
And so the cutoff point seems to be that you know enough, you understand enough to be able to say, okay, Jesus seems to be the real deal. He seems to be who he says he is.
And so likewise, when you&#8217;re discerning Catholicism, it needs to be more than, oh, I share this teaching with the Catholic Church. I think they got this one right. But it&#8217;s less than, I understand all of Catholic theology.
In fact, the danger of trying to get everything right before you become Christian or before you become Catholic is that you&#8217;re trying to do it apart from the help of divine grace. And so it ends up actually putting too much of an emphasis on you.
And so you should recognize once you get to a place where you can say, okay, the Church really is who she claims to be, this really is the institution created by Jesus Christ. If you can say that, you might still say there are 60 different issues that I&#8217;m baffled as to why the Catholic Church teaches X and not Y.
But as long as you can say I trust the church is right and I&#8217;m not, and it&#8217;s just a matter of I&#8217;ll have to understand it better as I go along, totally fine. Totally, absolutely fine. You can give an assent of knowing this thing&#8217;s true, even if you can&#8217;t give an explanation for why it&#8217;s true.
You know, you can believe in the Trinity before you can give a theological defense of how we know there&#8217;s three persons and one substance. You can believe in the real Presence without understanding the underlying kind of causality in the argumentation, all of it. That&#8217;s totally fine because you know enough to say yes in the come follow me invitational sense that&#8217;s laid out in Christianity.
So if that&#8217;s kind of where you&#8217;re at, I would say you&#8217;re in a great spot.
Second, a lot of this stuff sounds like it&#8217;s not even so much doctrine as maybe just practices. Things that feel very alien might be uncomfortable. People going from very free-flowing prayers to doing rote prayer where it&#8217;s, you know, prayer that&#8217;s been pre-written can sometimes feel like there&#8217;s something sort of stilted and artificial. That&#8217;s totally normal.
People who&#8217;ve been taught that, you know, even saying a prayer, asking their angel to intercede for them, or asking for Mary&#8217;s intercession, that this is idolatry, they&#8217;re wrong. But you can understand if that&#8217;s a psychological burden and you&#8217;re just like, I&#8217;m not totally comfortable doing it yet.
As long as you get exactly what you described to me, that&#8217;s fine. You don&#8217;t have to be totally comfortable with all of that stuff yet because you&#8217;re still in a place where you&#8217;re growing and moving forward. And it&#8217;s not as if the church is going to be like, we want to watch you say a rosary before we&#8217;re ready to confirm you. It&#8217;s not that. It&#8217;s normal to grow in this thing. Does that help?
Caller: Yeah, very much. And it&#8217;s not super alien. I mean, I forgot to mention this. That&#8217;s why I said coming back home, because I was born in the Catholic faith. I was baptized. I had my first Communion. And so I do have some recollection of having prayed to Mary at some point, but very, very, very faint.
And then after that, I mean, I&#8217;ve been a Protestant for multiple decades. I even been in ministry. I went from being a Baptist to being Reformed. And so, and here I am, still moving. And so it&#8217;s just been an interesting journey.
And actually, it&#8217;s kind of ironic because I remember years ago, this whole thing in part started because I was asked to do a study on the Lord&#8217;s Supper. I was at the Baptist church at the time. And delving into that, it&#8217;s just. It&#8217;s like, wait a minute. There really. There&#8217;s just something off here. This doesn&#8217;t really quite make sense that this would just be symbolic.
And this is, we&#8217;re going back, like, now seven years. So this has been a long coming journey for me, so.
Cy: Well, God bless you, brother.
Joe: That&#8217;s beautiful. I&#8217;m so happy to hear that. Is there a book that you would really like? We&#8217;d be happy to open the storehouse for you.

“Am I Ready to Become Catholic?”

<div>What do you say to someone who claims that the Vatican houses the Church's riches?</div><div>Grand churches such as the Vatican are not for the benefit of the Church per se but rather for the people of God and to give glory and honor to God.
As Catholics we believe that faith involves the whole person, not just our words. Beautiful art and buildings are meant to inspire us and draw us visually and emotionally into the realm of faith. For example, my parish is a beautiful nineteenth-century church full of marble. When the people of my neighborhood come to Mass or to pray, they can escape the harsh realities of the outside for a little while and bask in the beauty of their parish, which reflects to them the beauty of God and faith.
Grand churches also reflect our values. If we claim that God is the center of our lives and the most important thing, shouldn’t our buildings dedicated to God reflect that? As human beings we naturally associate importance with how much effort we put into something. If we pay little attention to the house of God and prayer, what would that say about the importance we place upon those things?
How much money the Catholic Church has is often exaggerated by legend and anti-Catholicism. In 2010, the Vatican had an income of $326 million and ran a $13 million budget surplus, but in 2011 the Vatican ran a $19 million deficit. And while some of that money obviously went to maintaining church buildings and art, much of it also went to charitable causes.
Recent re-evaluations of Vatican assets show that the Vatican has approximately $1 billion in total assets. For comparison, Harvard University’s endowment is over $30 billion. So, relatively speaking, the Catholic Church is not really wealthy, and no one blames museums for maintaining their art work and structures.
Money that is amassed merely for the comfort and advantage of a few would obviously be immoral. That can and does happen sometimes; clergy are affected by original sin the same as everyone else, and the Church does its best to root it out when discovered.
The world spends billions on maintaining history, art, and beauty without an uproar over how else that money could be spent. People seem to have better perspective and practicality on secular matters, but the facts are the facts. The Church, compared to other institutions and organizations, is not all that wealthy and proportionally seems to do much more good with what it has.
Jesus doesn’t need money, precious metals, or beautiful art. Those are not really the things we’re giving to Jesus; we’re giving our love and talent and giving thanks for the blessings we have received. When Jesus returns, I don’t think he’ll see the materials and money—he’ll see the love and devotion that produced it. And, of course, in the places and times we did it for our own glory rather than his, he’ll see that too.
</div>

Is the Vatican Rich?

<div>Does the JEDP theory tell us that the events in the Torah didn’t happen and that Moses was a historical person?</div><div>In principle, no. The four-source theory to which you refer only attributes different passages to different traditions in an attempt to discern how they were woven together to form the narrative and legislation of the Pentateuch. The question of historical fact is not directly the concern of this textual and literary perspective.
It is important to note, however, that this theory is not at all the only one or even the most credible one that explains the first five books of the Old Testament. With computer analysis and rhetorical analysis, many of the vocabulary-based presuppositions of this approach have already been brought into question.
Suffice it to say that this theory can be a useful tool in clarifying certain aspects of the text (as St. John Paul did in his analysis of Genesis in his theology of the body), but this does not mean that it is in all senses reliable or correct. After all, it was the Savior who said, &#8220;Moses spoke of me.&#8221;
</div>

Weaknesses of the Four-Source Theory

Before we get into talking about what makes a human act good or evil, we first have to make clear what role human beings have—and don’t have—in relation to morality.
A commonplace error of our times is that somehow human beings decide what is good or evil. That’s not true. We may decide what we think is good or evil, but whether what we think is right or not is a separate question. If Hitler thought gassing six million people was right, did it make it right? And if you think that an exaggeration, if one over-sexed husband thinks cheating on his wife is okay, does it make it morally okay?
In his pre-papal writings, Karol Wojtyła (St. John Paul II) speaks about “the experience of obligation.” It tells us something about morality and our relation to it.
All of us have had the experience of morality. All of us have, at one time or another, felt “I should do X” or “I should not do Y.” Let’s look closely at that commonplace human experience.
“I should not do X.” Why not? If morality is of my making, I should be able to dispense myself, shouldn’t I? Give myself a one-time exemption? But even if I attempt that ruse, I remain unconvinced. In the depths of my being, I still hear “I should not do X.” But I gave myself a waiver, didn’t I? What does that experience tell me?
It tells me that I am not the source of morality. If I were, I could change it or release myself from it. But try as I might, I cannot. I cannot, because I did not determine morality in the first place.
St. Paul said that God “wrote his law on our hearts” (Rom 2:15). In his Letter to the Romans, he describes the “experience of obligation” when he talks about the Law. He declares that “all men are sinners” (3:23). But how does he get away with that claim? The Jews had revelation: the Ten Commandments. The Christians had revelation: the Ten Commandments and Jesus’ teaching.
But nobody faxed a copy of the Ten Commandments to Rome. Nobody emailed the Sermon on the Mount to the Capitoline Hill. So how can you say that poor Roman pagans, deprived of revelation, are “sinners”?
Easy, says Paul. They recognize a law within themselves, a law they are consciously aware of having violated. They recognize moral disorder in themselves. Nobody has to sit down with little Julius and teach him, “Son, you seem to be falling behind for your age. Let’s practice lying!” Every man experiences a law he did not impose on himself, a law he also experiences as having violated.
It is because God wrote his Law in our hearts, not just on stone tablets.
That Law is not just some caprice, some arbitrary power move by God that he imposed on us. The moral law is not sheer divine willpower: God is bigger and stronger than us, so he can say, “Thou shalt not kill! Thou shalt not commit adultery!” And if he wanted, he could have said the exact opposite: “Thou shalt kill! Thou shall commit adultery!”
No, he couldn’t. That is the error of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-protestant-roots-of-the-pronoun-wars">nominalism</a>, a medieval philosophy that focused on God being all-powerful and, therefore, able to make morality however he wanted. It got a new lease on life in the Reformation, because most of the Reformers were nominalists, Luther at the head of them.
But we—as complex creatures (body and soul) and even more so as sinners—are internally divided. Our reason tells us what we should do, but our will doesn’t want to. Our emotions want to do good but like the prospect of the bad.
God is not like that. Who God Is (note the capital—God is Being itself—Exod. 3:14) is Good (the Supreme Good), True, and that is what he Wills. God could not make a world in which murder or adultery is “good” because God cannot be untrue to himself. He cannot declare “good” what is not he—e.g., Life and Fidelity.
Why harp on nominalism? Because it’s alive and well in our day. In the late Middle Ages and the Reformation, it might have been plausible to some: we say, after all, that God is “almighty.” But God is also all-knowing, all-wise, and all-good—and all those attributes are in harmony, not contradiction. So when we were talking about God, some thinkers may have imagined morality as “whatever God willed.”
But lots of things have happened since the Reformation, the most important of which is that people have stopped believing in God. What’s happened is that the role God used to have, applying the labels of “good” and “evil,” was taken over by man.
But man is a sinner. He’s not perfect. He’s hardly all-knowing. And his reason, emotions, and will are often at loggerheads. He’s hardly the substitute to exercise the divine role in saying what’s “good” or “evil.”
And yet some do. That’s why we hear such nonsense as “my good” or “your good.” Morals are not a matter of possessive pronouns; there is the good. And man’s experience of obligation—his inability to escape the awareness of moral duty despite his efforts to talk himself out of it—confirms that.
Only when we disabuse ourselves of the idea that we make morality can we start understanding what Christian, specifically Catholic, morality is. And that’s critical to understanding properly the role of conscience. Consciences are not looms; they don’t spin morality. They are, rather, mirrors: they reflect it. Some mirrors reflect well, others less so. But mirrors image things; they don’t make them.